Together with the Topf lab at the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (Hamburg), Kish Adoni from the Thalassinos lab has developed a novel pipeline that incorporates crosslinking-mass spectrometry data into AlphaFold2 for improved accuracy of protein structure determination. They found this workflow to be of particular relevance to proteins that occupy multiple conformations. The function of a protein is determined by its structure, via the structure-function relationship, and thousands of proteins modify their shape upon external cues such as molecular or protein interactions. As such, probing these conformational modifications is pivotal to characterising the protein’s behaviour, for example in the context of drug design when developing pharmaceuticals for drug-protein interactions.
Full paper can be read here.
