The study of antibodies has been a focal point in modern biology and medicine since the early 1900s. However, progress in therapeutic antibody development was slow and intermittent until recently. The first antibody therapy, murine-derived murononab OKT3 for acute organ rejection, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1986, more than a decade after César Milstein and Georges K?hler developed methods for the isolation of mouse monoclonal antibodies from hybridoma cells in 1975. As a result of the scientific, technological, and clinical breakthroughs in the 1980s and 1990s, the pace of therapeutic antibody discovery and development accelerated. Antibodies are becoming a major drug modality with more than two dozen therapeutic antibodies in the clinic and hundreds more in development. Despite the progress, need for improvement exists at every level. Antibody therapeutics provides fertile ground for protein scientists to fulfill the dream of personalized medicine through basic scientific discovery and technological innovation.
Circadian clocks are the internal time-keeping mechanisms for organisms to synchronize their cellular and physiological processes to the daily light/dark cycles. The molecular mechanisms underlying circadian clocks are remarkably similar in eukaryotes.
The biopharmaceutical industry has been greatly promoted by the application of drug and disease models, including both animal and cellular models. In particular, the emergence of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) makes it possible to create a large number of disease-specific cells
Integrase plays a critical role in the recombination of viral DNA into the host genome. Therefore, over the past decade, it has been a hot target of drug design in the fight against type 1 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1). Bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV) integrase has the same function as HIV-1 integrase. We have determined crystal structures of the BIV integrase catalytic core domain (CCD) in two different crystal forms at a resolution of 2.45? and 2.2?, respectively. In crystal form I, BIV integrase CCD forms a back-to-back dimer, in which the two active sites are on opposite sides. This has also been seen in many of the CCD structures of HIV-1 integrase that were determined previously. However, in crystal form II, BIV integrase CCD forms a novel face-to-face dimer in which the two active sites are close to each other. Strikingly, the distance separating the two active sites is approximately 20 ?, a distance that perfectly matches a 5-base pair interval. Based on these data, we propose a model for the interaction of integrase with its target DNA, which is also supported by many published biochemical data. Our results provide important clues for designing new inhibitors against HIV-1.
Proteolytic processing of viral polyproteins is indispensible for the lifecycle of coronaviruses. The main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV is an attractive target for anti-SARS drug development as it is essential for the polyprotein processing. Mpro is initially produced as part of viral polyproteins and it is matured by autocleavage. Here, we report that, with the addition of an N-terminal extension peptide, Mpro can form a domain-swapped dimer. After complete removal of the extension peptide from the dimer, the mature Mpro self-assembles into a novel super-active octamer (AO-Mpro). The crystal structure of AO-Mpro adopts a novel fold with four domain-swapped dimers packing into four active units with nearly identical conformation to that of the previously reported Mpro active dimer, and 3D domain swapping serves as a mechanism to lock the active conformation due to entanglement of polypeptide chains. Compared with the previously well characterized form of Mpro, in equilibrium between inactive monomer and active dimer, the stable AO-Mpro exhibits much higher proteolytic activity at low concentration. As all eight active sites are bound with inhibitors, the polyvalent nature of the interaction between AO-Mpro and its polyprotein substrates with multiple cleavage sites, would make AO-Mpro functionally much more superior than the Mpro active dimer for polyprotein processing. Thus, during the initial period of SARS-CoV infection, this novel active form AO-Mpro should play a major role in cleaving polyproteins as the protein level is extremely low. The discovery of AO-Mpro provides new insights about the functional mechanism of Mpro and its maturation process.
We here present a detailed study of the ligand-receptor interactions between single and triple-helical strands of collagen and the α2A domain of integrin (α2A), providing valuable new insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of collagen-integrin binding at a sub-molecular level. The occurrence of single and triple-helical strands of the collagen fragments was scrutinized with atom force microscopy (AFM) techniques. Strong interactions of the triple-stranded fragments comparable to those of collagen can only be detected for the 42mer triple-helical collagen-like peptide under study (which contains 42 amino acid residues per strand) by solid phase assays as well as by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measurements. However, changes in NMR signals during titration and characteristic saturation transfer difference (STD) NMR signals are also detectable when α2A is added to a solution of the 21mer single-stranded collagen fragment. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations employing different sets of force field parameters were applied to study the interaction between triple-helical or single-stranded collagen fragments with α2A. It is remarkable that even single-stranded collagen fragments can form various complexes with α2A showing significant differences in the complex stability with identical ligands. The results of MD simulations are in agreement with the signal alterations in our NMR experiments, which are indicative of the formation of weak complexes between single-stranded collagen and α2A in solution. These results provide useful information concerning possible interactions of α2A with small collagen fragments that are of relevance to the design of novel therapeutic A-domain inhibitors.