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Updated: May 11, 2026

High-Resolution Neutron Spectroscopy to Study Picosecond-Nanosecond Dynamics of Proteins and Hydration Water
Published on: April 28, 2022
[Functionally-relevant conformational dynamics of water-soluble proteins]
Abstract:
A study is reported of the functional-relevant dynamics of three typical water-soluble proteins: Calmodulin, Src-tyrosine kinase as well as repressor of Trp operon. Application of the state-of-art methods of structural bioinformatics allowed to identify dynamics seen in the X-ray structures of the investigated proteins associated with their specific biological functions. In addition, Normal Mode analysis technique revealed the most probable directions of the functionally-relevant motions for all that proteins were also predicted. Importantly, overall type of the motions observed on the lowest-frequency modes was very similar to the motions seen from the analysis of the X-ray data of the examined macromolecules. Thereby it was shown that the large-scale as well as local conformational motions of the proteins might be predetermined already at the level of their tertiary structures. In particular, the determining factor might be the specific fold of the alpha-helixes. Thus functionally-relevant in vivo dynamics of the investigated proteins might be evolutionally formed by means of natural selection at the level of the spatial topology.
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