Regulatory mechanisms in bacterial toxin-antitoxin modules

Project Details

Description

Proteins are small nanomachines that carry out almost all tasks within a living cell: catalyzing enzymatic reactions, acting as pumps or motors, regulating gene expression, ... The biochemical activities of proteins are regulated at different levels: transcription, via post-translational modifications, product inhibition and allosteric effectors and via differential proteolytic degradation. Understanding these different regulatory mechanisms is crucial in order to comprehend how the mixture of proteins in a living cell makes an interacting network that can respond to external and internal stimuli. Removal of this level of complexity will result in chaos and cell death. In this project I propose to study, by combining different methods in structural biology and biophysics, bacterial toxin-antitoxin (TA) modules as model systems to unravel molecular aspects of protein-protein interactions and regulation of protein activities. TA modules are stress response elements that form small self-regulating circuits and are ideal subjects to study protein regulatory mechanisms and protein-protein interactions. Their mutual interactions often contain one or more allosteric components and intrinsic disorder and protein dynamics in general play an important role in their functional mechanisms
AcronymFWOAL756
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/01/1531/12/18

Keywords

  • Applied Biology

Flemish discipline codes in use since 2023

  • Bacteriology

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