Structure-function studies on protein homodimers

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Many proteins function in pairs: two identical protein chains associate with each other to make a functional unit. In a sense, they are like a set of identical twins that work together. One way of investigating how proteins work is by introducing changes into them by site-directed mutagenesis, which allows a scientist to specify how the protein is changed, and then to study how those changes affect the function of the protein. When applied to proteins with two identical chains, both chains will be altered. It would be interesting to study such proteins in which only one chain is altered, to see how this affects the functional unit. Think of the twins again, and imagine that they are both right handed (after all, they are identical!). Site directed mutagenesis would allow you to change their handedness, so they are both left handed. How would this change affect how they work? What if you could change the handedness of just one of the twins, so that you could see how the pair works when one is left handed and the other is right-handed? This is what our laboratory does: we prepare dimer pairs that are no longer identical, and study the properties of the pair. As close to half of all known proteins consist of such pairs, our work is of general value, even though we restrict ourselves to just a handful of proteins.