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Researchers Describe Drug-Protein
Dance
in Nervous System
Researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston have taken a step toward the design of better drugs to treat neurological diseases.
Vasanthi Jayaraman, Ph.D.
Vasanthi Jayaraman, Ph.D., assistant professor of integrative biology and pharmacology, and her team are the first to show the process by which a drug recognizes the glutamate receptor – an important protein involved in diseases of the central nervous system, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and epilepsy – and the changes the drug initiates in the protein.
The finding, published in the November issue of Nature Chemical Biology, is an important step toward understanding how a drug controls a protein.
Jayaraman combined two existing technologies in a new way so that the team could watch the changes in the vibration of the drug and protein. “The key is that we could do it in microsecond time frame,” she said. “The traditional millisecond techniques are too slow; you aren’t able to see what happens.”
She compared the new method to watching a movie versus looking at still photos, as seen by other structural methods. “It’s like if you went to a movie, and instead of seeing the movie, you were seeing still photographs at given intervals,” she said. “You would not see the motion. All you would see are some states from which you would have to deduce the whole story.
“What we do is actually watch the whole thing as it happens, so we have a movie versus everybody else just having still pictures,” she said.
From the technology of this “movie,” Jayaraman and her colleagues were able to see the communication between a drug and a protein as an immediate reaction. “It’s a very beautifully choreographed dance between the drug and the protein,” she said.
Co-authors were Qing Cheng, Ph.D., former graduate student; Mei Du, Ph.D., instructor; and Gomathi Ramanoudjame, Ph.D., research fellow.
By Camille Webb, Medical School