Thursday, December 5th at 11:00am EST -- please join our webinar to hear Homay Valafar, Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina, discuss Structure Validation of Proteins using REDCAT.

The utility of residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) has increased precipitously in the recent years. The utility of this new source of NMR data includes direct structure determination of proteins, nucleic acids and carbohydrates. RDCs have also been used to deduce the relationship of sub-units in multi-domain proteins and describe bound ligand geometry. Recently, RDCs have been utilized in the context of high-throughput structure determination by a number of structural genomics initiative centers. RDC data are anticipated to play a crucial role in structural characterization of challenging proteins such as homo-multimeric and membrane proteins. The emergence of a broad range of applications of RDCs has underlined the need for a sophisticated, user friendly, powerful and flexible analysis software tool. Analysis of RDC data in structure determination of biological macromolecules is not straight forward and presents its own set of challenges. In part, this is because RDCs represent a fundamental change from distance-dependent to orientation-dependent data. This fundamental shift in the information content of data leaves the currently existing analysis tools inadequate or inappropriate. Software package REDCAT has been developed in response to a direct need for analysis of RDC data by the international community of researchers. Although REDCAT provides a software analysis platform for general analysis of RDC data, one of its important contributions is validation of structure and identification of structural regions that are in disagreement with the experimentally acquired data.

In this presentation, REDCAT will be demonstrated in two specific applications: validation of a structure, and assembly of molecular domains. In both exercises simulated RDC data will be utilized. In the first exercise we utilize simulated RDC data from the hTS protein that has been subjected to internal dynamics. The effects of internal dynamics will be investigated through REDCAT. In the second exercise the protein 1A1Z is used to illustrate the mechanism by which two domains of a protein can be reassembled by using RDC data. All of the required data are included in the accompanying package.

For more information on REDCAT software, check out the REDCAT website , which includes a user manual and a number of helpful tutorials.

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