Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

A collection of interesting papers from the recent literature – there’s something for everyone here. Enjoy.

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About a year ago we reported of PLoS and Molsoft launching a new way of publishing structural biology related papers. A couple of days ago I’ve stumbled on one such paper, published in PLoS biology and decided to take the technology for a ride.

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In a recent post, Derek Lowe, from “In The Pipeline”, asks his readership “If we could just walk right up and calculate the free energies of binding events reliably, what would you most want such calculations to be able to do for you? What would convince you that they’re actually believable? And how close to you think that we actually are to that?” We tried to briefly answer some of these questions. How close are we to predict small molecules binding free energy?

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How do enzymes catalyze reactions? There are countless answers of course, but one answer that has gained much attention and popularity in recent years is – through intrinsic dynamics. Is that so? PNAS recently published a paper by Arieh Warshel entitled: “Enzyme millisecond conformational dynamics do not catalyze the chemical step”. Warshel, an avid assailant of the coupling between dynamics and catalysis was met by Martin Karplus, devoted advocate for catalytic dynamics, to engage in a public dispute over the letters section of PNAS. Who do you find more convincing?

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The latest crop of interesting literature in our field. There are a bunch of papers about protein dynamics (and its conservation) and another bunch on protein design. And if you search carefully there is also one paper by us on peptide docking with a new Rosetta protocol.

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In a recent review published in Biochemistry, Kaufmann, Lemmon and DeLuca et al. from the Meiler Lab, cover the Rosetta modeling suite capabilities. More importantly, as supplementary information they provide tutorials to demonstrate 6 basic use cases of Rosetta.

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Another compilation of forty some titles from the recent literature all about your favorite computational structural biology science. Two of the papers are by Rosetta Design Group’s members – see if you can find waldo. Enjoy.

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This is the fifth and last post in the CAPRI series, summarizing the presentations of Xiaoqin Zou and Ora Schueler-Furman (Saving the best for last..), as provided by the speakers. I hope the CAPRI series was able to give a snapshot of the state of computational protein-protein docking and its community. I want to thank again to everyone that took part in the meeting and helped me with this series.

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Traditionally, computational protein design efforts have been directed at calculating a single sequence predicted to fold to a particular target structure. Recently, however, a number of conceptual generalizations have been pursued, ranging from the use of backbone flexibility, off-rotamer side chain flexibility, negative design, multi-body potentials, conformational free energy, and prediction of sequence profiles. Below I present our state-of-the-art research whose goal is to understand how protein sequences are optimized to be compatible with binding multiple partners with high affinity. – By Menachem Fromer.

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This is the fourth post in the CAPRI series, summarizing the presentations of Paul Bates, Martin Zacharias, and Carlos Camacho, as provided by the speakers. More to appear in the continuation of the series.

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