Regulatory mechanisms in bacterial toxin-antitoxin modules (FWOAL756)

Proteins are small nanomachines that carry out almost all tasks within a living cell: catalyzing enzymatic reactions, acting as pumps or motors, regulating gene expression, ... The biochemical activities of proteins are regulated at different levels: transcription, via post-translational modifications, product inhibition and allosteric effectors and via differential proteolytic degradation. Understanding these different regulatory mechanisms is crucial in order to comprehend how the mixture of proteins in a living cell makes an interacting network that can respond to external and internal stimuli. Removal of this level of complexity will result in chaos and cell death. In this project I propose to study, by combining different methods in structural biology and biophysics, bacterial toxin-antitoxin (TA) modules as model systems to unravel molecular aspects of protein-protein interactions and regulation of protein activities. TA modules are stress response elements that form small self-regulating circuits and are ideal subjects to study protein regulatory mechanisms and protein-protein interactions. Their mutual interactions often contain one or more allosteric components and intrinsic disorder and protein dynamics in general play an important role in their functional mechanisms

Keywords:Applied Biology

Disciplines:Bacteriology