Intrinsically
Unstructured Proteins - They Should Not Exist
For about 50 years it
was a believed that a protein needs to have a structure to be functionally
active. In the last 5 years, more and more proteins have been identified
that do not require a structure to perform its biological function. Rather
they use their higher flexibility for their advantage and can perform new
and exciting functions. Members of the Peti Laboratory at Brown University
have detected a large number of these proteins. As a summer project you
would need to use biochemistry (protein expression, protein purification)
to isolate these proteins, and analyze them using Fluorescence
spectroscopy using a brand new instrument (Flouromax-4), which was just
recently purchased. It will enable us to characterize how the change in
flexibility of these proteins is correlated with their function when they
interact with a common binding partner, in our case a Ser/Thr phosphatase.
