We’re bringing a lot of order into the messy world of protein complexes.
- Sebastian Ahnert
A new ‘periodic table’ of protein complexes, devised by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, provides a unified way to classify and visualise protein complexes, which drive a huge range of biological processes, from DNA replication to catalysing metabolic reactions.
The table, published in the journal Science, offers a new way of looking at almost all known molecular structures and predicting how new ones could be made, providing a valuable tool for research into evolution and protein engineering.
By using the table, researchers are able predict the likely forms of protein complexes with unknown structure, estimate the feasibility of entirely new structures, and identify possible errors in existing structural databases. It was created by an interdisciplinary team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Genome Campus.
Almost every biological process depends on proteins interacting and assembling into complexes in a specific way, and many diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are associated with problems in complex assembly. The principles underpinning this organisation are not yet fully understood, but the new periodic table presents a systematic, ordered view on protein assembly, providing a visual tool for understanding biological function.
“We’re bringing a lot of order into the messy world of protein complexes,” said the paper’s lead author Sebastian Ahnert of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, a physicist who regularly tangles with biological problems. “Proteins can keep combining in these simple ways, adding more and more levels of complexity and resulting in a huge variety of structures. What we’ve made is a classification based on underlying principles that helps people get a handle on the complexity.”
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Image: The periodic table of proteins
Credit: Spencer Phillips, EMBL-EBI
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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