Conformationally Dynamics in Biomolecule function

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We are a young research group focused on biological chemistry at Simon Fraser University. The overall aim of our program is to understand, predict, and control how the structure and dynamics of biological molecules govern their function. The focus of the proposed research is to link motion ("conformational dynamics") of unstructured loops in proteins and nucleic acids to the ability of these molecules to recognize their ligands, and to understand how differences in dynamics engender divergent function. These aims are significant to our mechanistic understanding and eventual targeting of the following systems proposed for investigation: 1) Cryptochromes and photolyases, a pair of structurally homologous but functionally divergent proteins. Photolyases are DNA repair enzyme that function by flipping damaged bases from the DNA duplex, while cryptochromes have essential, yet poorly understood, functions in human physiology, but are incapable of carrying out this DNA repair. 2) Riboswitches, recently discovered RNA molecules capable of turning genes on and off in response to binding of small molecules. Our aims are also more broadly significant because we predict that the mechanistic insight will be general. Thus, with these investigations we hope to better understand how proteins and nucleic acids use sequence-dependent loop dynamics to encode ligand specificity and exchange amongst functionally-specific conformations.