Dr Sarah Shammas

 University of Oxford, UK

 https://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/aspsite/index.asp?pageid=1364

A significant proportion of eukaryotic proteins contain long disordered regions, which have no single stable structure and instead populate a myriad of highly heterogenous conformations that interchange very rapidly. These proteins are still functional within the cell. The particular over-representation of protein disorder within transcription factors suggests an important biological role for disorder within transcription factors. How functionally important is protein disorder for these critical regulatory proteins, why, and through what mechanism(s)?

Shammas lab uses biophysical assays, and in particular kinetic studies, to address the mechanism of interactions between transcription factors and their binding partners e.g. transcriptional coactivators and DNA. By combining the results of these studies with our findings from molecular dynamics simulations, structural biology (NMR and ESR), and in vivo imaging we examine the role of protein disorder within transcriptional regulation.