Predicting the Strength of Zinc Metal Binding Sites in Proteins (360G-Wellcome-203756_Z_16_A)

Many proteins bind to metal ions, and rely on these interactions in order to properly carry out their function - indeed failure to do so is responsible for a number of diseases. Understanding the details of how these metal-protein interactions work and developing tools to predict their occurence in newly discovered proteins, as well as predicting sites that are created when proteins interact with one another, will aid our understanting of these diseases. Such knowledge would also allow us to engineer metal binding sites into synthetic proteins, which would have enormous benefits in biosensing, novel pharmaceuticals, and developing synthetic biological circuits. This project will focus specifically on zinc-protein interactions - creating a publicly accessible database resource of known zinc binding sites, and developing sophisticated tools for predicting the location and strength of zinc binding sites in a given protein structure, including sites that occur when two protein chains come together. Ultimately the project seeks to allow a researcher to modify a protein without zinc binding ability, to enable it to bind zinc and to reveal sites for drug design to modify zinc binding.