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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The Temperature-Dependent Conformational Ensemble Of Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease (Mpro), Ali Ebrahim, Blake T. Riley, Desigan Kumaran, Babak Andi, Martin R. Fuchs, Sean Mcsweeney, Daniel A. Keedy Nov 2021

The Temperature-Dependent Conformational Ensemble Of Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease (Mpro), Ali Ebrahim, Blake T. Riley, Desigan Kumaran, Babak Andi, Martin R. Fuchs, Sean Mcsweeney, Daniel A. Keedy

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic, instigated by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, continues to plague the globe. The SARS-CoV-2 main protease, or Mpro, is a promising target for development of novel antiviral therapeutics. Previous X-ray crystal structures of Mpro were obtained at cryogenic temperature or room temperature only. Here we report a series of high-resolution crystal structures of unliganded Mpro across multiple temperatures from cryogenic to physiological, and another at high humidity. We interrogate these datasets with parsimonious multiconformer models, multi-copy ensemble models, and isomorphous difference density maps. Our analysis reveals a temperature-dependent conformational landscape for Mpro, including …


Supercharged Models Of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins And Their Utility In Sensing, Peter J. Schnatz Sep 2018

Supercharged Models Of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins And Their Utility In Sensing, Peter J. Schnatz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I show that greatly increasing the magnitude of a protein’s net charge using surface supercharging transforms that protein into a ligand-gated or counterion-gated conformational molecular switch. To demonstrate this I first modified the designed helical bundle hemoprotein H4 using simple molecular modeling, creating a highly charged protein which both unfolds reversibly at low ionic strength and undergoes the ligand-induced folding transition commonly observed in signal transduction by intrinsically disordered proteins in biology. Due to the high surface charge density, ligand binding to this protein is allosterically activated by low concentrations of divalent cations and the polyamine spermine. …