Seminar

Structural analysis of proteins with tandem repeats, by hybrid approaches

Dr. Andrey Kajava

A significant portion of proteins with fundamental functions contain arrays of tandem repeats. Over the last years a large body of evidence has been accumulated about the high incidence of tandem repeats in the virulent proteins of pathogens, toxins and allergens. Thus, discovery of these domains and their structure-function study promises to be a fertile direction for research leading to the identification of targets for new medicaments and vaccines.

These proteins are under-represented in the databases of the 3D structures because their large molecular weight and elongated filamentous shapes hamper X-ray crystallography and NMR studies. These difficulties increase the potential impact of hybrid approaches that combine bioinformatics analysis, molecular modeling, x-ray fiber diffraction, electron microscopy, STEM mass measurements, optical spectroscopy, and other biophysical techniques. This presentation will provide examples of application of hybrid methods for prediction of the 3D structures of proteins with tandem repeats. Current challenges in this area including identification of protein repeats in genomes, prediction and molecular modeling of the 3D structure of these proteins, inferring of their functions and application of such data to the annotation of genomes will also be presented.