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发表于 2006-8-25 10:38:24
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Posted 24 Aug 2006 6:26:58 UTC
Today was an exciting day for the group! In our vaccine design and enzyme design calculations, the end result is an amino acid sequence for a protein predicted to be a good vaccine or catalyst of a chemical reaction. The next step is to make a gene--a piece of DNA--that codes for the amino acid sequence. Due to advances in technology, rather than having to laboriously synthesize each gene in the lab, we can buy genes for any amino acid sequence for not to much from DNA synthesis companies, and we are lucky to be collaborating with a startup company in Boston called Codon who can make them for us quite cheaply. Today we ordered genes for 16 potential HIV vaccines, 15 potential new enzymes, and 4 potential new protien-protein complexes. I say potential above because our design calculations are not perfect, and we won't really know if these proteins act as designed until after we get the genes back in a month or so. Then we take advantage of modern molecular biology techniques to put the genes into bacteria where they direct the cells to make large amounts of the designed proteins. We can then separate the designed proteins from the rest of the stuff in the bacteria using a special tag we include in each of them that provides a good handle. Once we have the purified designed proteins, we can see whether they bind the desired antibodies in the case of the vaccine designs or catalyze the desired reactions in the case of the enzymes. In this way, we will learn about both the strengths and weaknesses of the rosetta design methodology, and hopefully have crated proteins that can have a very positive effect on the world!
在疫苗和酶设计方面的进展:已经将一批设计结果拿到商业公司去进行合成(说是还比较便宜),然后还需要进行一些相关的实验。
As Hugo pointed out, we have not quite gotten the design methodology to the point we can run it on rosetta@home, but this should be coming in not too long as several people in my group are now focusing on this. Before this, look for protein-protein docking calculations where we are trying to predict the structures of the complexes between proteins which mediate much of the basic processes important to life. Chu Wang, a graduate student in the group, is close to having his docking methodology compatible with distributed computing, and we anticipate breakthroughs in this importnat problem as it also seems largely limited by cpu power.
这方面的设计工作目前还不能在Rosetta@home进行,但应该很快就能实现了。
Currently running on rosetta@home are the last of the casp tests on protein structure refinement (see the casp7 website) and tests of a general approach for estimating how much compute power is necessary to find the lowest energy structure for a sequence. I will describe the basic idea behind this approach in one of my next posts.
目前Rosetta@home上运行的是最后一批casp的任务包,同时也在测试对于一个氨基酸序列如何估算寻找到最低能量结构所需要的计算力。 |
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