Amino acid alchemy transmutes sheets to coils
Service, R.F.
Science 277(5323): 179
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 9235629 Document Number: 475976
Yale University biochemist Lynne Regan and colleagues have altered no more than 50 percent of a small protein's amino-acid building blocks to convert its 3-D structure from one that looks like a sheet with four flat strips lying alongside each other to one that looks like a collection of four helical telephone cords bundled together. Peter Kim, a protein designer at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, says the surprisingly small number of amino-acid differences between the two could affect efforts to deduce the shapes of new proteins by comparing their sequences to those of known ones. The result appeared in the July issue of Nature Structural Biology.