Università della Svizzera italiana

Oxidation state dependent conformational changes of HMGB1 regulate the formation of the CXCL12/HMGB1 heterocomplex

Fassi, Enrico M.A. ; Sgrignani, Jacopo ; D'Agostino, Gianluca ; Cecchinato, Valentina ; Garofalo, Maura ; Grazioso, Giovanni ; Uguccioni, Mariagrazia ; Cavalli, Andrea

In: Computational and structural biotechnology journal, 2019, vol. 17, p. 886-894

High-mobility Group Box 1 (HMGB1) is an abundant protein present in all mammalian cells and involved in several processes. During inflammation or tissue damage, HMGB1 is released in the extracellular space and, depending on its redox state, can form a heterocomplex with CXCL12. The heterocomplex acts exclusively via the chemokine receptor CXCR4 enhancing leukocyte recruitment. Here, we used...

Università della Svizzera italiana

How phosphorylation influences E1 subunit pyruvate dehydrogenase : A computational study

Sgrignani, Jacopo ; Chen, JingJing ; Alimonti, Andrea ; Cavalli, Andrea

In: Scientific reports, 2018, vol. 8, p. 14683

Pyruvate (PYR) dehydrogenase complex (PDC) is an enzymatic system that plays a crucial role in cellular metabolism as it controls the entry of carbon into the Krebs cycle. From a structural point of view, PDC is formed by three different subunits (E1, E2 and E3) capable of catalyzing the three reaction steps necessary for the full conversion of pyruvate to acetyl-CoA. Recent investigations...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Enhancing coevolution-based contact prediction by imposing structural self-consistency of the contacts

Kassem, Maher M. ; Christoffersen, Lars B. ; Cavalli, Andrea ; Lindorff-Larsen, Kresten

In: Scientific reports, 2018, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 11112

Based on the development of new algorithms and growth of sequence databases, it has recently become possible to build robust higher-order sequence models based on sets of aligned protein sequences. Such models have proven useful in de novo structure prediction, where the sequence models are used to find pairs of residues that co-vary during evolution, and hence are likely to be in spatial...