°Predictive modeling of proteins encoded by a plant virus sheds a new light on their structure and inherent multifunctionality

Lab members Brandon Roy and Jess Choi work together to publish a paper revolved around the molecular mechanics of grapevine fanleaf virus, a serious threat to grapevine production worldwide. With the advent of new software for protein prediction, they leveraged the capacity of protein modeling on the entire GFLV genome to analyze and postulate functions of each protein. Two strains with the most currently available published data, ‘GHu’ and ‘F13’, were parsed for protein encoding regions and analyzed for three-dimensional confirmation models. The models produced from over 20 programs ranged in confidence and they identified two algorithms to be the most confident; AlphaFold2 and D-I-TASSER. These models, along with other confirmatory analyses confirmed eight previously known molecular functions of GFLV proteins, and predicted several additional functions across the entire genome and satellite RNA molecule. This work represents an updated understanding of the GFLV genome and strategically points to future directions in elucidating the molecular biology of GFLV.

Biomolecules: 14(1), 62

 

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