Knottin cyclization: impact on structure and dynamics.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Present in various species, the knottins (also referred to as inhibitor cystine knots) constitute a group of extremely stable miniproteins with a plethora of biological activities. Owing to their small size and their high stability, knottins are considered as excellent leads or scaffolds in drug design. Two knottin families contain macrocyclic compounds, namely the cyclotides and the squash inhibitors. The cyclotide family nearly exclusively contains head-to-tail cyclized members. On the other hand, the squash family predominantly contains linear members. Head-to-tail cyclization is intuitively expected to improve bioactivities by increasing stability and lowering flexibility as well as sensitivity to proteolytic attack.

Results

In this paper, we report data on so

SUBMITTER: Heitz A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2659701 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature