Abstract: The fact that some amino acid chains fold alone into natively structured and fully functional proteins in solution, has led to the commonly accepted “one sequence-one structure” notion. However, within the cell, protein chains are not formed in isolation, to fold alone once produced. Rather, they are translated from genetic coding instructions (for which many versions exist to code a single amino acid sequence) and begin to fold before the chain has fully formed through a process known as co-translational folding. The effect of coding and co-translational folding mechanisms on the final protein structure are not well understood and there are no studies showing side-by-side structural analysis of protein pairs having alternative synonymous coding. We are using the wealth of high-resolution protein structures available in the Protein Data Bank to computationally explore the association between genetic coding and local protein structure and pinpoint positions of alternate conformations in homologous proteins that cannot be readily explained by the amino acid sequence or protein environment.
Bio: Alex Bronstein received an M.Sc. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the Technion. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Technion holding the Schmidt Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Dan Broida Academic Chair and heading the Center for Intelligent Systems. He also served as the Vice Dean for Industry Liaisons. Alex’s main research interests are theoretical and computational methods in geometric data analysis and their application to a broad range of problems in imaging, machine vision, graphics, and learning. Alex is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of four grants from the European Research Council (ERC). In addition to his academic activities, he is a technological entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded and served in leading technical roles in various startup companies including the hardware startup Invision which was acquired by Intel and became the basis for Intel’s RealSense depth cameras technology, the media startup Videocites offering Internet-scale B2B video indexing and tracking, the biomedical startup Embryonics building AI products for the fertility market, and the fintech startup Sibylla.
Referente : Umberto Castellani
