Reflecting recent work in the Wennemers Lab

Nature uses elaborate methods to control protein assembly, including that of heterotrimeric collagen.

In work published in JACS, members of the Helma Wennemers Group, establish design principles for the composition and register-selective assembly of synthetic collagen heterotrimers.

The assembly code enabled the self-sorting of eight different strands into three─out of 512 possible─triple helices via complementary (4S)-aminoproline and aspartate residues. Native ESI-MS corroborated the specific assembly into coexisting heterotrimers.