RESEARCH
Following the groundbreaking 2014 Nature paper describing the development of a computational method to design multi-component coassembling protein nanoparticles, comes a publication in Protein Science from Baker lab graduate student Jacob Bale and collaborators. Titled “Structure of a designed tetrahedral protein assembly variant engineered to have improved soluble expression“, the paper reports a variant of a previously low yielding tetrahedral designed material for which structure determination was difficult. The new variant described in the paper had a much improved yield after redesign and the structure obtained agreed with the computational model with high atomic-level accuracy. The methods used here to improve soluble protein yield will be generally applicable to improving the yield of many designed protein nanomaterials.
INSTITUTE
Congratulations to newly minted PhDs and graduates of the Baker lab Dr. Shawn Yu and Dr. Ray Wang! Both defended their dissertations this month. Dr. Yu gave a talk on “Computational design of interleukin-2 mimetics” and Dr. Wang spoke about “Protein structure determination from cryoEM density maps”. We wish them the best of the luck in their next steps!
The annual RosettaCON meeting was held July 29-Aug1 at the beautiful Sleeping Lady Mountain Resort in Leavenworth, WA. Many IPD scientists attended the conference, heard talks from researchers in Rosetta labs across the country, presented posters on their own research, and socialized with the larger Rosetta community.