The effect of nucleotide changes on the three-dimensional structure of immune receptor complexes

Francesca Capon (primary)
Medical and Molecular Genetics
King's College London
Franca Fraternali (secondary)
Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics
King's College London

Abstract

Characterising the consequences of naturally occurring nucleotide changes is a powerful approach to the identification of amino acid residues that are critical to protein function. While, numerous computational tools have been developed to predict variant effects in-silico, these have variable accuracy and do not fully exploit information on protein three-dimensional structure.

Here we propose to combine experimental and computational methods to identify the amino acid substitutions that are more likely to de-stabilize the structure of multi-protein complexes. As the discrimination between benign and deleterious changes can be especially challenging for immune genes, the project will focus on variants that affect inflammatory proteins.


References

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BBSRC Area
Genes, development and STEM* approaches to biology
Area of Biology
GeneticsStructural Biology
Techniques & Approaches
BioinformaticsBiophysicsGenetics