Browsing by Subject "Protein structure"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing
(Nature Publishing Group, 2010-09) Demir, Emek; Cary, M. P.; Paley, S.; Fukuda, K.; Lemer, C.; Vastrik, I.; Wu, G.; D'Eustachio, P.; Schaefer, C.; Luciano, J.; Schacherer, F.; Martinez-Flores, I.; Hu, Z.; Jimenez-Jacinto, V.; Joshi-Tope, G.; Kandasamy, K.; Lopez-Fuentes, A. C.; Mi, H.; Pichler, E.; Rodchenkov, I.; Splendiani, A.; Tkachev, S.; Zucker, J.; Gopinath, G.; Rajasimha, H.; Ramakrishnan, R.; Shah, I.; Syed, M.; Anwar, N.; Babur, Özgün; Blinov, M.; Brauner, E.; Corwin, D.; Donaldson, S.; Gibbons, F.; Goldberg, R.; Hornbeck, P.; Luna, A.; Murray-Rust, P.; Neumann, E.; Reubenacker, O.; Samwald, M.; Iersel, Martijn van; Wimalaratne, S.; Allen, K.; Braun, B.; Whirl-Carrillo, M.; Cheung, Kei-Hoi; Dahlquist, K.; Finney, A.; Gillespie, M.; Glass, E.; Gong, L.; Haw, R.; Honig, M.; Hubaut, O.; Kane, D.; Krupa, S.; Kutmon, M.; Leonard, J.; Marks, D.; Merberg, D.; Petri, V.; Pico, A.; Ravenscroft, D.; Ren, L.; Shah, N.; Sunshine, M.; Tang R.; Whaley, R.; Letovksy, S.; Buetow, K. H.; Rzhetsky, A.; Schachter, V.; Sobral, B. S.; Doğrusöz, Uğur; McWeeney, S.; Aladjem, M.; Birney, E.; Collado-Vides, J.; Goto, S.; Hucka, M.; Novère, Nicolas Le; Maltsev, N.; Pandey, A.; Thomas, P.; Wingender, E.; Karp, P. D.; Sander, C.; Bader, G. D.
Biological Pathway Exchange (BioPAX) is a standard language to represent biological pathways at the molecular and cellular level and to facilitate the exchange of pathway data. The rapid growth of the volume of pathway data has spurred the development of databases and computational tools to aid interpretation; however, use of these data is hampered by the current fragmentation of pathway information across many databases with incompatible formats. BioPAX, which was created through a community process, solves this problem by making pathway data substantially easier to collect, index, interpret and share. BioPAX can represent metabolic and signaling pathways, molecular and genetic interactions and gene regulation networks. Using BioPAX, millions of interactions, organized into thousands of pathways, from many organisms are available from a growing number of databases. This large amount of pathway data in a computable form will support visualization, analysis and biological discovery. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Laminin mimetic peptide nanofibers regenerate acute muscle defect
(Acta Materialia Inc, 2017) Cimenci, C. E.; Uzunalli, G.; Uysal, O.; Yergoz, F.; Umay, E. K.; Güler, Mustafa O.; Tekinay, A. B.
Skeletal muscle cells are terminally differentiated and require the activation of muscle progenitor (satellite) cells for their regeneration. There is a clinical need for faster and more efficient treatment methods for acute muscle injuries, and the stimulation of satellite cell proliferation is promising in this context. In this study, we designed and synthesized a laminin-mimetic bioactive peptide (LM/E-PA) system that is capable of accelerating satellite cell activation by emulating the structure and function of laminin, a major protein of the basal membrane of the skeletal muscle. The LM/E-PA nanofibers enhance myogenic differentiation in vitro and the clinical relevance of the laminin-mimetic bioactive scaffold system was demonstrated further by assessing its effect on the regeneration of acute muscle injury in a rat model. Laminin mimetic peptide nanofibers significantly promoted satellite cell activation in skeletal muscle and accelerated myofibrillar regeneration following acute muscle injury. In addition, the LM/E-PA scaffold treatment significantly reduced the time required for the structural and functional repair of skeletal muscle. This study represents one of the first examples of molecular- and tissue-level regeneration of skeletal muscle facilitated by bioactive peptide nanofibers following acute muscle injury. Significance Statement Sports, heavy lifting and other strength-intensive tasks are ubiquitous in modern life and likely to cause acute skeletal muscle injury. Speeding up regeneration of skeletal muscle injuries would not only shorten the duration of recovery for the patient, but also support the general health and functionality of the repaired muscle tissue. In this work, we designed and synthesized a laminin-mimetic nanosystem to enhance muscle regeneration. We tested its activity in a rat tibialis anterior muscle by injecting the bioactive nanosystem. The evaluation of the regeneration and differentiation capacity of skeletal muscle suggested that the laminin-mimetic nanosystem enhances skeletal muscle regeneration and provides a suitable platform that is highly promising for the regeneration of acute muscle injuries. This work demonstrates for the first time that laminin-mimetic self-assembled peptide nanosystems facilitate myogenic differentiation in vivo without the need for additional treatment.
Open Access
Retinal proteins as model systems for membrane protein folding
(Elsevier BV, 2014) Tastan, O.; Dutta, A.; Booth, P.; Klein-Seetharaman, J.
Experimental folding studies of membrane proteins are more challenging than water-soluble proteins because of the higher hydrophobicity content of membrane embedded sequences and the need to provide a hydrophobic milieu for the transmembrane regions. The first challenge is their denaturation: due to the thermodynamic instability of polar groups in the membrane, secondary structures in membrane proteins are more difficult to disrupt than in soluble proteins. The second challenge is to refold from the denatured states. Successful refolding of membrane proteins has almost always been from very subtly denatured states. Therefore, it can be useful to analyze membrane protein folding using computational methods, and we will provide results obtained with simulated unfolding of membrane protein structures using the Floppy Inclusions and Rigid Substructure Topography (FIRST) method. Computational methods have the advantage that they allow a direct comparison between diverse membrane proteins. We will review here both, experimental and FIRST studies of the retinal binding proteins bacteriorhodopsin and mammalian rhodopsin, and discuss the extension of the findings to deriving hypotheses on the mechanisms of folding of membrane proteins in general. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Retinal Proteins - You can teach an old dog new tricks.
Open Access
Smolign: a spatial motifs-based protein multiple structural alignment method
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2012) Sun, H.; Sacan, A.; Ferhatosmanoglu, H.; Wang Y.
Availability of an effective tool for protein multiple structural alignment (MSTA) is essential for discovery and analysis of biologically significant structural motifs that can help solve functional annotation and drug design problems. Existing MSTA methods collect residue correspondences mostly through pairwise comparison of consecutive fragments, which can lead to suboptimal alignments, especially when the similarity among the proteins is low. We introduce a novel strategy based on: building a contactwindow based motif library from the protein structural data, discovery and extension of common alignment seeds from this library, and optimal superimposition of multiple structures according to these alignment seeds by an enhanced partial order curve comparison method. The ability of our strategy to detect multiple correspondences simultaneously, to catch alignments globally, and to support flexible alignments, endorse a sensitive and robust automated algorithm that can expose similarities among protein structures even under low similarity conditions. Our method yields better alignment results compared to other popular MSTA methods, on several protein structure data sets that span various structural folds and represent different protein similarity levels. A web-based alignment tool, a downloadable executable, and detailed alignment results for the data sets used here are available at http://sacan.biomed. drexel.edu/Smolign and http://bio.cse.ohio-state.edu/Smolign.