HOUSTON -- (Jan. 26, 2012) -- Like a magician employing sleight of hand, the protein mitoNEET -- a mysterious but important player in diabetes, cancer and aging -- draws the eye with a flurry of movement in one location while the subtle, more crucial action takes place somewhere else.
Using a combination of laboratory experiments and computer modeling, scientists from Rice University and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have deciphered part of mitoNEET's movements to get a better understanding of how it handles its potentially toxic payload of iron and sulfur. Their research is described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We scrutinize proteins with an unconventional approach," said Jos Onuchic, Rice's Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. "We use biophysics to probe biology rather than the other way around. Using computational theory, we find structures that are possible -- regardless of whether they've already been observed experimentally -- and we ask ourselves whether these structures might be biologically significant."
Study co-leader Patricia Jennings, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD, who has collaborated with Onuchic for 15 years, said they save a great deal of time by using structural biophysics to guide their experiments on a wide variety of targets. For example, Jennings' laboratory determined less than five years ago that mitoNEET contained a novel folded structure. Since then, her lab has been using insights gained from static and dynamic snapshots of the protein to guide biological and biochemical studies.
"I think people forget that proteins are machines with moving parts," said study lead author Elizabeth Baxter, a UCSD graduate student who works under the guidance of both Onuchic and Jennings. "We start with the static snapshot and model in the funct
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| Contact: Jade Boyd jadeboyd@rice.edu 713-348-6778 Rice University Source:Eurekalert |
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