Towards Structure-Property-Function Relationships for Eumelanin
Paul Meredith, B. J. Powell, Jennifer Riesz, Stephen Nighswander-Rempel, Mark R. Pederson, Evan Moore
Abstract
We discuss recent progress towards the establishment of important structure-property-function relationships in eumelanins - key functional bio-macromolecular systems responsible for photo-protection and immune response in humans, and implicated in the development of melanoma skin cancer. We focus on the link between eumelanin's secondary structure and optical properties such as broad band UV-visible absorption and strong non-radiative relaxation; both key features of the photo-protective function. We emphasise the insights gained through a holistic approach combining optical spectroscopy with first principles quantum chemical calculations, and advance the hypothesis that the robust functionality characteristic of eumelanin is related to extreme chemical and structural disorder at the secondary level. This inherent disorder is a low cost natural resource, and it is interesting to speculate as to whether it may play a role in other functional bio-macromolecular systems.
Create a lesson
Related papers
SaltyMeta: a curated benchmark and protein language model-informed web tool for salty peptide prediction
Wanchao Chen, Wen Li, Yanan He et al.
Exploring Optimal Parameters for Ligand-Based Virtual Screening in Early Drug Discovery
Temitope Sobodu, Victor Chibuzor Johnson, Ryan Kern et al.
Synthesizing State-of-the-Art Structure Predictions from Soup of Co-folding Models
Hyosoon Jang, Taewon Kim, Sungsoo Ahn
Sequence-Informed Geometric Evaluation of RNA 3D Structures
Andrea Zerio, Yighua Yao, Alessandro Micheli et al.
Multi-ligand simultaneous docking of Carica papaya leaf phytochemicals, Carpaine and Rutin, reveals multi-mechanism inhibition of cancer proteins BCL-2 and WWP1
Merla Sudha, Asmita Saha, Belaguppa Manjunath Ashwin Desai et al.
Predicting directional flexibility in proteins
Vsevolod Viliuga, Leif Seute, Matteo Tadiello et al.