Carlos Alemán et al 2006 Phys. Biol. 3 S54 doi:10.1088/1478-3975/3/1/S06
Concepts and schemes for the re-engineering of physical protein modules: generating nanodevices via targeted replacements with constrained amino acids
Carlos Alemán1, David Zanuy1, Ana I Jiménez2, Carlos Cativiela2, Nurit Haspel3, Jie Zheng4, Jordi Casanovas5, Haim Wolfson3 and Ruth Nussinov4,6
Show affiliationsPhysically building complex multi-molecular structures from naturally occurring biological macromolecules has aroused a great deal of interest. Here we focus on nanostructures composed of re-engineered, natural 'foldamer' building blocks. Our aim is to provide some of the underlying concepts and schemes for crafting structures utilizing such conformationally relatively stable molecular components. We describe how, via chemical biology strategies, it is further possible to chemically manipulate the foldamer building blocks toward specific shape-driven structures, which in turn could be used toward potential-designed functions. We outline the criteria in choosing candidate foldamers from the vast biological repertoire, and how to enhance their stability through selected targeted replacements by non-proteinogenic conformationally constrained amino acids. These approaches combine bioinformatics, high performance computations and mathematics with synthetic organic chemistry. The resulting artificially engineered self-organizing molecular scale structures take advantage of nature's nanobiology toolkit and at the same time improve on it, since their new targeted function differs from that optimized by evolution. The major challenge facing nanobiology is to be able to exercise fine control over the performance of these target-specific molecular machines.
- PACS
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87.15.H- Dynamics of biomolecules
87.15.B- Structure of biomolecules
87.15.Cc Folding: thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, models, and pathways
- Subjects
- Dates
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Issue 1 (March 2006)
Received 14 October 2005, accepted for publication 2 February 2006
Published 22 February 2006
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Concepts and schemes for the re-engineering of physical protein modules: generating nanodevices via targeted replacements with constrained amino acids
Carlos Alemán et al 2006 Phys. Biol. 3 S54
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