What is it about?
There four main ways to unfold proteins in a lab, chemicals, heat, pressure and force. There is some evidence that which method you choose affects the measured refolding process. This means that no one method completely surveys all possible unfolded conformations.
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Why is it important?
In a cell, a protein may have to refold under different conditions. For example, a protein folds while it is being translated on the ribosome and then may have to refold again after the cell had a temporary increase in temperature. These conditions may cause the protein to refold differently or even misfold in one case.
Perspectives
Trying to predict how a protein will fold from the sequence of amino acids is a problem scientists have been trying to solve for over 50 years. I think one reason we have not been successful is we have not understood how the protein is unfolded affects what we observe in refolding.
Lisa Lapidus
Michigan State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Protein unfolding mechanisms and their effects on folding experiments, F1000Research, September 2017, Faculty of 1000, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.12070.1.
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