1bgs: Difference between revisions

[[Image:1bgs.jpg|left|200px]]<br /><applet load="1bgs" size="350" color="white" frame="true" align="right" spinBox="true"  

BACKGROUND: Protein-protein recognition is fundamental to most biological processes. The information we have so far on the interfaces between proteins comes largely from several protease-inhibitor and antigen-antibody complexes. Barnase, a bacterial ribonuclease, and barstar, its natural inhibitor, form a tight complex which provides a good model for the study and design of protein-protein non-covalent interactions. RESULTS: Here we report the structure of a complex between barnase and a fully functional mutant of barstar determined by X-ray analysis. Barstar is composed of three parallel alpha-helices stacked against a three-stranded parallel, beta-sheet, and sterically blocks the active site of the enzyme with an alpha-helix and adjacent loop. The buried surface in the interface between the two molecules totals 1630 A2. The barnase-barstar complex is predominantly stabilized by charge interactions involving positive charges in the active site of the enzyme. Asp39 of barstar binds to the phosphate-binding site of barnase, mimicking enzyme-substrate interactions. CONCLUSION: The phosphate-binding site of the enzyme is the anchor point for inhibitor binding. We propose that this is also likely to be the case for other ribonuclease inhibitors.

1BGS is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_complex Protein complex] structure of sequences from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_amyloliquefaciens Bacillus amyloliquefaciens]. Full crystallographic information is available from [http://oca.weizmann.ac.il/oca-bin/ocashort?id=1BGS OCA].  

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