A Novel Approach to Modeling pH-sensitive Regions Within Proteins

Between a half-million and a million proteins are encoded in the 25,000 genes recently sequenced by the Human Genome Project. Many proteins have pH-sensitive regions which are fundamental to the protein structure and function. Investigating and modeling pH-sensitive regions within proteins will not only improve the overall accuracy of protein docking, design and folding predictions; but it will also greatly extend the modeling capabilities of Rosetta, one of the most accurate and comprehensive protein prediction algorithms. Proteins previously outside the scope of protein prediction algorithms, particularly membrane fusion peptides and enzymes, will now be included in Rosetta's modeling arsenal.