Engineering Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Protein Switches: Engineering, Characterizing, And Understanding A Novel And A Natural Switch, James Vincent Price

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout nature, many proteins provide a specific function in response to some input signal (e.g., phosyphorylation, pH, etc.), a process that is oftentimes described as switching a protein “on” or “off.” The advent of protein engineering has allowed for the creation and understanding of chimeric proteins for uses in a number of applications such as therapeutics, biosensors and energy production. Two proteins, hemagglutinin (HA) of fowl plague influenza virus and a chimeric protein comprising a fusion between the LFA-1 I domain and the EF3 and EF4 hands of calmodulin, have been investigated in this dissertation. Both of these proteins undergo …