Dr Z. Faidon Brotzakis, senior post-doctoral researcher at the Skretas lab, in collaboration with Shengyu Zhang, Mhd. Hussein Murtada and Prof. Michele Vendruscolo from the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge, recently published in Nature Communications a research article entitled “AlphaFold prediction of structural ensembles of disordered proteins”. Their study describes a multidisciplinary approach combining AlphaFold data and Molecular Dynamics to characterize the structural dynamics disordered proteins.
The researchers demonstrated that AlphaFold-Metainference enhances structure prediction for disordered proteins compared to AlphaFold2 alone and achieves similar or higher accuracy in 80% of cases tested compared to conventional molecular dynamics when benchmarked against SAXS data. These findings illustrate how integrating molecular simulations with machine learning predictions enables a more detailed characterization of disordered proteins, contributing to the broader understanding of their role in health and disease.
Congratulations Faidon!