In a paper published in Nature Chemical Biology, Assistant Professor Vatsan Raman describes a new computation-guided method to optimize the design of split protein systems that can be used to monitor and regulate biological activity.
Split protein systems are biochemical tools that can be used to monitor and regulate biological activity. A protein of interest is broken into two inactive pieces that, under user-defined conditions, can rejoin to form a functional protein. However, it can be difficult to engineer a split such that the protein will reconstitute effectively only under the desired conditions.
The new method is called SPORT for Split Protein Optimization by Reconstitution Tuning.