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Tertiary chirality describes the handedness of supramolecular assemblies and relies not only on the primary and secondary structures of the building blocks but also on topological driving forces that have been sparsely characterized. Helical biopolymers, especially DNA, have been extensively investigated as they possess intrinsic chirality that determines the optical, mechanical, and physical properties of the ensuing material. Here, we employ the DNA tensegrity triangle as a model system to locate the tipping points in chirality inversion at the tertiary level by X-ray diffraction. We engineer tensegrity triangle crystals with incremental rotational steps between immobile junctions from 3 to 28 base pairs (bp). We construct a mathematical model that accurately predicts and explains the molecular configurations in both this work and previous studies. Our design framework is extendable to other supramolecular assemblies of helical biopolymers and can be used in the design of chiral nanomaterials, optically active molecules, and mesoporous frameworks, all of which are of interest to physical, biological, and chemical nanoscience.
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Tertiary Alcohols as Radical Precursors for the Introduction of Tertiary Substituents into Heteroarenes
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null (Ed.)Protein molecules are inherently dynamic and modulate their interactions with different molecular partners by accessing different tertiary structures under physiological conditions. Elucidating such structures remains challenging. Current momentum in deep learning and the powerful performance of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in complex domains, such as computer vision, inspires us to investigate GANs on their ability to generate physically-realistic protein tertiary structures. The analysis presented here shows that several GAN models fail to capture complex, distal structural patterns present in protein tertiary structures. The study additionally reveals that mechanisms touted as effective in stabilizing the training of a GAN model are not all effective, and that performance based on loss alone may be orthogonal to performance based on the quality of generated datasets. A novel contribution in this study is the demonstration that Wasserstein GAN strikes a good balance and manages to capture both local and distal patterns, thus presenting a first step towards more powerful deep generative models for exploring a possibly very diverse set of structures supporting diverse activities of a protein molecule in the cell.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acscatal.9b00405
