Understanding a protein fold: The physics, chemistry, and biology of α-helical coiled coils.

ABSTRACT: Protein science is being transformed by powerful computational methods for structure prediction and design: AlphaFold2 can predict many natural protein structures from sequence, and other AI methods are enabling the de novo design of new structures. This raises a question: how much do we understand the underlying sequence-to-structure/function relationships being captured by these methods? This perspective presents our current understanding of one class of protein assembly, the α-helical coiled coils. At first sight, these are straightforward: sequence repeats of hydrophobic (h) and polar (p) residues, (hpphppp)_n, direct the folding and assembly of amphipathic α helices into bundles. However, many different bundles are possible: they can have two or more helices (different oligo

SUBMITTER: Woolfson DN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10124910 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature