A team of scientists led by David Baker at the University of Washington developed a method to design artificial proteins to serve as a framework for viral antigens. Their study was published recently in the journal eLife. Berkeley Lab scientists collected data at the Advanced Light Source to visualize the atomic structure and determine the dynamics of the designed scaffolds.
Rotavirus VP3 Is a Multifunctional Capping Machine
Combining cryo-electron microscopy, biochemical assays, and protein crystallography at Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline 5.0.2 (part of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology), researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine discovered that rotavirus VP3 incorporates in one place all the enzymatic activities required to effectively cap rotavirus mRNA, making it unique among viral-capping enzymes.
BCSB Helps Elucidate Mechanism of Innate Immune Response
The crystallographic study of STING (stimulator of interferon genes), a transmembrane protein that plays a key role in innate immunity, in complex with TBK1 (serine/threonine-protein kinase), an enzyme that regulates the inflammatory response to foreign DNA, is extremely challenging due to weakly diffracting crystals. But thanks to the expertise of Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) scientists, researchers from Texas A&M University (TAMU) were able to pinpoint the conserved motif of STING that mediates the recruitment and activation of TBK1. They published their results in Nature.
BCSB Helps Characterize New Arsenic-based Antibiotic
A newly-discovered arsenic-containing compound produced by a soil bacterium shows promise as a broad-spectrum antibiotic. In a paper published in the Nature journal Communications Biology, an international team of researchers demonstrated that arsinothricin (AST) is effective against many types of gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. The effort was led by Barry Rosen of the Florida International University College of Medicine and Masafumi Yoshinaga of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) in Japan. Banumathi Sankaran, a research scientist in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BSCB) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), was an author on the paper.
Researchers Identify Openings for Shuttering Virus Factories
A team led by Mary Estes of the Baylor College of Medicine used rotavirus as a model to study some of the proteins involved in making the cytoplasmic compartments in which many DNA and RNA virus pathogens replicate. Banumathi Sankaran, a research scientist in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BSCB) at the Advanced Light Source, collected the X-ray data at the BCSB Beamline 5.0.1 that were used to solve the three-dimensional structures of nonstructural protein NSP2. Understanding the functions of proteins that make these compartments could offer an avenue for disrupting virus production. The team published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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