Macromolecular assemblies, cellular machines comprised of many individual proteins, perform many essential tasks in the cell. To understand how these assemblies function and to develop strategies to modulate them for therapeutic purposes, we need to describe the structure, dynamics and interactions of the underlying proteins. These large assemblies, however, often elude structural characterization by the conventional techniques of X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy. Integrative Structural Biology addresses these difficult targets by computational integration of information from different sources.
I will present an integrative method that utilizes data from a variety of fast and accessible experimental techniques for rapid and accurate structure determination of protein-protein complexes. In many cases, due to protein dynamics, a single structural model cannot explain the observed data. To address this problem we developed an additional method for computing multiple models whose combination is consistent with the data. I will show how structural models computed by these methods aid in understanding the function of various macromolecules.
Dr. Dina Schneidman, University of California, San Francisco.