View Alexandrescu Structure Gallery

Link to Alexandrescu Lab Structures in the PDB

We're going to start using this space to post our latest BioRxiv preprints (marked in purple). It takes so long to go through the journal system. Might as well post them here in the meantime.

84) Rua, A.J., Alexandrescu, A.T (2024) “ Formerly degenerate seventh zinc finger domain from transcription factor ZNF711 rehabilitated by experimental NMR structure",  bioRxiv preprint

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.06.588434

During Covid lockdown one of us (Andrei) spent a lot of time staring at sequences of "degenerate" zinc fingers, that are supposed to be non-functional. We started wondering "what if"? This is the second of seven zinc fingers we're working on, that are either annotated as degenerate or not even recognized as a zinc finger. I guess even in the age of AI, you can't believe everything you read on the internet! All seven are functional and we're studying their structures and biophysics. Yes, we know with NMR and cryo-EM pushing for ever larger complexes, zinc fingers are probably seen by the community as low-hanging fruit. It turns out you can eat quite well on low-hanging fruit (within our research budget), especially if authoritative databases designate the low-hanging fruit as inedible. We think they are fascinating, which is why we keep doing new ones. Read the manuscript and see if you agree.

83) Reed, A.L., Mitchell, W, Alexandrescu, A.T, Alder, N.N.. (2023) “Interactions of amyloidogenic proteins with mitochondrial protein import machinery in aging-related neurodegenerative diseases”,  Front Physiol 14, 1263420.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2023.1263420

A review from the Alder lab about how amyloid proteins might interact with mitochondria using their protein import machinery.

82) Seo, D., Kammerer, R.A., Alexandrescu, A.T. (2023) “Solution NMR assignments and structure for the dimeric kinesin neck domain”, Biomol NMR Assign 17, 301-307.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12104-023-10159-x

This project was started 20 years ago!! But we did some other things along the way for the past two decades. Diana was my first undergraduate research student at UConn. Twenty years later she's the CEO of her own company!  It was kind of hard to get ahold of her, to let her know about the manuscript. It was based on her undergrad thesis. I was looking at her thesis and thought: 'hey, this would make a nice straightforward publication'.