Proteins in dynamic equilibrium

摘要

Technologies for determining protein structure have contributed immensely to our understanding of molecular biology, providing us with three-dimensional models at atomic resolution to explain the molecular basis of physiologically important interactions between biochemically active molecules. But as we emerge from a decade of massive investment in structural genomic projects, it is becoming increasingly clear that a complete description of biomolecular activity also requires an understanding of the nature and role of protein conformational dynamics. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yang et al. describe a method that could provide us with just such an understanding - a combination of com-putational simulations and experimental X-ray scattering data enables the observation of shifts in the equilibrium population of protein conformational states.