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IMAGE: A team led by Nevan Krogan at Gladstone and UCSF has demonstrated that a large-scale and systematic genetic approach can indeed yield reliable and detailed information on the structure of...
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Credit: QBI, UCSF
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--December 10, 2020--One of biologists' most vexing tasks is figuring out how proteins, the molecules that carry the brunt of a cell's work, do their job. Each protein has a variety of knobs, folds, and clefts on its surface that dictate what it can do. Scientists can visualize these features fairly easily on individual proteins. But proteins don't act alone, and scientists also need to know the shape and composition--the structure, as they call it--of the complexes that proteins form when working together.