Föreläsningar och seminarier George Klein och What is Life föreläsning "The Simple QTY Code for Protein Design"
Talare: Shuguang Zhang, MIT, U.S.A
Host: Ingemar Ernberg
Abstract
In 2011, Shuguang Zhang conceived the QTY code to design water-soluble membrane proteins. The QTY code is based on two key molecular structural facts: 1) all 20 amino acids are found in natural alpha-helices: I) hydrophilic, II) hydrophobic and III) amphiphilic; 2) several amino acids share striking structural similarities despite their different chemical properties: glutamine (Q) vs Leucine (L); Threonine (T) vs Valine (V); and Tyrosine (Y) vs Phenylalanine (F). The simple QTY code has big impact for designs of water-soluble variants of water-insoluble membrane proteins including GPCRs, glucose transporters, solute carrier transporters, ABC transporters, potassium ion channels, beta-barrel outer membrane proteins, and perhaps aggregated proteins.
Zhang, S., et al (2018) QTY code enables design of detergent-free chemokine receptors that retain ligand-binding activities. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 115 (37) E8652-E8659.
Zhang, S. & Egli, M. (2022) Hiding in plain sight: three chemically distinct α-helix types. Quarterly Review of Biophysics (QRB) 55, e7
The QTY code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QTY_Code
Shuguang Zhang is at MIT Media Lab. He received his Ph.D. from University of California at Santa Barbara. He won a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and Wilhelm Exner Medal of Austria. He was elected to Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2010, US National Academy of Inventors in 2013, the European Academy of Science and Arts in 2021. He won the 2020 Emil Thomas Kaiser Award from the Protein Society. He has published over 200 scientific papers cited over 38,600 with a h-index 93.
He is also a board member of Molecular Frontiers Foundation. Molecular Frontiers Foundation organizes annually Molecular Frontiers Symposia in Sweden and around the world. The Foundation encourages young people to ask big and good scientific questions about nature. The selected winners will be awarded for Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Prize.