Original title: The allosteric lever: towards a principle of specific allosteric response
Authors: Maximilian Vossel, Bert L. de Groot, Aljaž Godec
The article explores allostery, where a molecule’s change in one spot affects another far away. This phenomenon is crucial in controlling how biomolecules work and is vital in drug discovery and designing materials. Despite its importance, understanding the rules governing allostery has been tough. Unlike structural patterns or natural movements, the focus here is on elastic network models. They discover something called an “allosteric lever” that controls how changes spread in specific directions: from where it starts to where it affects. By studying this, they find that this response is nonlinear, meaning it doesn’t follow a straight line, and isn’t reciprocal, where both sides are equal. This discovery could help design drugs better by predicting where these changes happen in proteins. It’s also interesting that these levers exist not only in proteins but also in artificial networks designed to act like proteins.
Original article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12025