Exam Topic: Allosteric regulation in an intrinsically disordered protein
Exam will be held at 9:00 am – 12:00 pm on Friday January 10, 2020 in Beury 120.
When biochemists think of allosteric regulation, we often visualize a model in which a signal is transmitted through coupled conformational transitions of a folded protein. This exam will focus on a paper from the Hilser group at Johns Hopkins that probes the allosteric mechanism by which an intrinsically disordered protein can regulate gene transcription:
Li, J., White, J. T., Saavedra, H., Wrabl, J. O., Motlagh, H. N., Liu, K., et al. (2017). Genetically tunable frustration controls allostery in an intrinsically disordered transcription factor. eLife, 6. http://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30688
See also the accompanying eLife Insight article: Eliezer, D. (2017). Proteins acting out of (dis)order. eLife, 6. http://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32762 https://elifesciences.org/articles/32762
The exam will mostly test your understanding of the research presented in the paper. To do well, you should have a basic understanding of allostery (as taught in undergraduate biochemistry), and be able to discuss the function of human glucocorticoid receptor (the subject of the paper), as well as the methods and results of the experiments presented in the research article.
Post-exam review
For those who are interested, I will host a post-exam review session at 12 noon on Monday January 13 (room TBA)! If there’s enough interest I’ll get pizza 🙂