Acta Phys. -Chim. Sin. ›› 2012, Vol. 28 ›› Issue (10): 2381-2389.doi: 10.3866/PKU.WHXB201209144

• BIOPHYSICAL CHEMISTRY • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Folding Mechanism of De novo Designed Proteins

ZHANG Zhu-Qing   

  1. College of Life Science, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P. R. China
  • Received:2012-08-24 Revised:2012-09-14 Published:2012-09-26
  • Supported by:

    The project was supported by the President Foundation B of Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y15102GN00), Open Project Program of Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS) (Y15301P1A8)

Abstract:

Protein de novo design and protein folding are two different means to investigate“sequencestructure- function”relationship of proteins, which is one of the most important focuses in structural biology. The successful achievements in protein de novo design indicate the understanding accuracy of the knowledge in protein structure and interaction, while most of those designed proteins show different folding kinetic features from nature occurring proteins, which implies that there are still many challenges to the aim of getting them to play expected biological function. In this review, the status of research and development for protein de novo design, as well as the study progress of protein folding in experimental, theoretical and simulation aspects, have been introduced. Further, the investigations of folding mechanism of de novo designed proteins have been reviewed, and the new clue has been proposed that systematically investigation of the essence of different folding mechanism between the two types of protein would help to provide useful insight for more efficient protein rotational design.

Key words: Protein de novo design, Protein folding, Target structure, Kinetic features of folding