【 Hefei Evening News 】 The achievements of HKUST were selected as the top ten domestic science and technology news in 2022

On December 23, the China Media Group, together with the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the China Association for Science and Technology, and the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense jointly selected the top 10 domestic and international science and technology news in 2022. Among them, the research results of Liu Haiyan and Chen Quan's team at the University of Science and Technology of China to establish a new method of protein skeleton structure design were selected as the third of the top ten domestic science and technology news.

Proteins are the most important biological macromolecules that perform life functions, and their three-dimensional spatial structure is of great significance to their functions. At present, proteins that can form stable three-dimensional structures are almost all natural proteins, and their amino acid sequences are formed by long-term natural evolution. When the natural protein structure and function can not meet the needs of industrial or medical applications, it is necessary to design the structure and sequence of specific functional proteins.

Traditional protein design methods, which use natural structural fragments as building blocks to splice together to produce new structures, significantly limit the structural diversity and variability of artificially designed proteins. On February 10, 2022, the team of Liu Haiyan and Chen Quan from the University of Science and Technology of China published a research paper in Nature, establishing a data-driven model to automatically search the protein backbone structure space and generate a highly designable skeleton, thus breaking through the limitation that only natural fragments can be splice to generate new backbone structures, and significantly expanding the structural diversity of de novo designed proteins. High-resolution crystal structures of nine de novo designed protein molecules are reported, all of which are consistent with design expectations, and four proteins have novel structures different from known natural proteins.

This achievement realizes the original innovation of key core technologies in the frontier field of protein design, and lays a solid foundation for the design of functional proteins such as industrial enzymes, biological materials, and biomedical proteins.

(Hefei Tong client - All media reporter Liu Changsichen)

https://newspaper.hf365.com/hfwb/pc/content/202212/26/content_370980.html