Nature puts forward a new view of molecular switches: the mystery of how cells complete complex tasks

The protein network is responsible for maintaining the survival and health of cells

"We have new discoveries related to a fundamental part of regulatory biology," said Dr.

In order to understand how a single protein acts on many other proteins at the same time, Kortemme studied a molecular switch called Gsp1, which plays an important role in regulating cell growth and intracellular molecular transport

Kortemme collaborated with senior co-author Dr.

Kortemme is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, and the director of QBI, an organized research unit in the School of Pharmacy

Activities in biological systems can be thought of as being produced by genes that carry protein instructions

Kortemme and her team used a novel method to observe the effects of Gsp1 molecular switches on different scales in the pathway from genes to organisms

They found that introducing a single mutation into a protein at the genetic level can have complex and dramatic effects on cell biology

Dr.

Kortemme said that this scale effect was first theorized in the 1980s, and Kortemme's research provided the first experimental evidence to support it

Even proteins that regulate other proteins need to be regulated

The team found four sites on the Gsp1 switch where this shape change can occur

Kortemme sees the promise of using multi-scale methods to reveal similar sites in other regulatory proteins

Original title:

Systems-level effects of allosteric perturbations to a model molecular switch