This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The University of California at San Francisco is awarded a grant to create, improve and disseminate advanced molecular modeling and prediction methods for the characterization and redesign of interactions between proteins. Protein interactions and the complex networks that they form are critical to essentially all biological processes. Tools to characterize and alter individual interactions are important to determine protein function within these interaction networks. This project will create such methods to advance biological research on protein functions. The project extends previous computational methods co-developed by the PI (Rosetta and RosettaInterface) that have been used to determine crucial interactions in the interfaces between proteins and to create new and modified protein interactions, in collaborations with biologist. This research will produce: (i) improved and easily accessible tools for non-specialists to characterize proteins and protein interfaces by predicting the effects of amino acid mutations, (ii) new and improved protocols for changing the properties of protein interactions by reengineering them and (iii) advanced tools to facilitate difficult protein engineering problems by designing libraries of candidate proteins to generate hypotheses for experimental testing.
New, improved and automated computational methods generated and integrated by this project will be available to researchers as a RosettaInterface web resource (at http://kortemmelab.ucsf.edu/). The source code will be freely available (www.rosettacommons.org/) for applications in computational biology, bioinformatics, structural biology and synthetic and cellular biology. Graduate, undergraduate and high-school students will utilize the RosettaInterface resource in group ?team challenges?, summer internships and research projects in biological engineering.
