Summary



Protein-protein interactions are the basis of cellular structure and function, and understanding these interactions is key to understanding cell life itself. Dr. Alessandra Carbone and her team continue to analyze data on these interactions from the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project, and they recently published a new paper to contribute to the body of knowledge in this field.



In the video above, Dr. Alessandra Carbone gave an overview of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project and its work as of 2014. Since that time, she and her team have published several papers using the project data, including the paper described in this update.

Dr. Alessandra Carbone (principal investigator of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project) and team have published a paper entitled "Hidden partners: Using cross-docking calculations to predict binding sites for proteins with multiple interactions" in the journal Proteins.

Protein interactions are the basis for most biological functions. How they interact with each other and other compounds (such as DNA, RNA, and ligands) in the cell is key to understanding life and disease functions. Complicating things, proteins often interact with more than one other kind of protein. To better understand protein functions, tools are required to uncover these potential interactions.

Different parts (surfaces) of the protein can be binding sites that attract another protein. This paper describes a methodology the research team developed to better predict these alternative binding sites. A subset of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project data was used to validate their technique, which will be subsequently applied to the whole dataset computed via World Community Grid.