| STUDY |
APPROACHING THE PROBLEM from the other direction, some researchers are using high-throughput assays to help direct computational studies. Amy E. Keating, assistant chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies the interactions of common proteins used in DNA transcription, known as bZIP transcription factors. These proteins have characteristic regions of coiled coils, which bind together. Scientists want to understand how the amino acid sequences in these coiled coil regions determine what combinations of bZIP proteins will dimerize.
Keating's group created a two-dimensional array of all possible combinations of about 50 coiled coil regions from different bZIP proteins. They used fluorescent markers to determine how strongly different combinations dimerized. Strikingly, only a few combinations bound well
|