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0:00
Hi, my name is Madan Babu,
and I'm a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
What l'll be doing in the next 45 minutes or so,
is to talk to you about a problem that we've been interested in for several years,
which involves a group of proteins called intrinsically unstructured proteins.
Research of the last several decades have clearly shown,
that most proteins need to adopt
a defined three-dimensional structure in order to carry out their function.
And this is exemplified by the availability of numerous enzyme structures,
that highlight the requirement to position
particular chemical groups in special proximity,
in order to carry out enzyme catalysis.
However, more recently, it's becoming increasingly clear that the large fraction of
the proteome of any organism do not encode
for proteins that adopt a defined three-dimensional structure,
but they are nevertheless important for function.
And it is this group of proteins that
I'll be referencing as intrinsically unstructured proteins,
and this is going to be the topic of my discussion today.
1:01
Before moving on with my presentation,
I'd like to spend a slide describing the kind of work that we do in my group.
So my group is basically interested in understanding how regulation
is achieved in cellular systems at different levels of complexity.
We address this problem by investigating
regulatory processes that involve protein-protein,
protein-nucleic acids,
and protein-small molecule interactions at three distinct levels of complexity.
At the molecular level,
we aim to discover novel features of regulatory systems,
such as discovering new domains and identifying functions of un-characterized proteins.
At the systems level,
we aim to understand how the different regulatory processes
influence each other to maintain cellular homeostasis.
And at the genomic level,
we aim to understand the interplay between regulation and genome organization.
So in today's presentation,
I'll discuss some of our work on the regulation of intrinsically unstructured proteins.
