ArticleNature chemical biology2011
Knot formation in newly translated proteins is spontaneous and accelerated by chaperonins.
Article in Nature chemical biology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tied to Work: Topologically Knotted SPOUT Methyltransferases and UCH Deubiquitinases in Cellular Biochemistry.Journal of cellular biochemistry · 2026Review
- Generating knotted polymer and protein structures by machine learning.Communications chemistry · 2026Article
- Peptide cages: bioinspired supramolecular architectures for next-generation applications.Chemical science · 2026Review
- Folding and knotting of biotic and prebiotic amino acid sequences through reverse evolution.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Folding of a tandemly knotted protein: Evidence that a polypeptide chain can get out of deep kinetic traps.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2025Article
- Is There a Functional Role for the Knotted Topology in Protein UCH-L1?Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2024Article
- Folding a Molecular Strand into a Trefoil Knot of Single Handedness with Co(II)/Co(III) Chaperones.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Structure, dynamics, and stability of the smallest and most complex 7The Journal of biological chemistry · 2024Article
- AlphaFold predicts novel human proteins with knots.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2023Article
- AlphaFold predicts the most complex protein knot and composite protein knots.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2022Article
- Revealing Topological Barriers against Knot Untying in Thermal and Mechanical Protein Unfolding by Molecular Dynamics Simulations.Biomolecules · 2021Article
- Converging experimental and computational views of the knotting mechanism of a small knotted protein.Biophysical journal · 2021Article
- On topology and knotty entanglement in protein folding.PloS one · 2021Article
- Nascent Folding of Proteins Across the Three Domains of Life.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2021Article
- Tying up the Loose Ends: A Mathematically Knotted Protein.Frontiers in chemistry · 2021Article
- Mechanically tightening, untying and retying a protein trefoil knot by single-molecule force spectroscopy.Chemical science · 2020Article
- Tying different knots in a molecular strand.Nature · 2020Article
- Mechanical unfolding of a knotted protein unveils the kinetic and thermodynamic consequences of threading a polypeptide chain.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Restriction of S-adenosylmethionine conformational freedom by knotted protein binding sites.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Searching the Optimal Folding Routes of a Complex Lasso Protein.Biophysical journal · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Topological knots are found in a considerable number of protein structures, but it is not clear how they knot and fold within the cellular environment. We investigated the behavior of knotted protein molecules as they are first synthesized by the ribosome using a cell-free translation system. We found that newly translated knotted proteins can spontaneously self-tie and do not require the assistance of molecular chaperones to fold correctly to their trefoil-knotted structures. This process is slow but efficient, and we found no evidence of misfolded species. A kinetic analysis indicates that the knotting process is rate limiting, occurs post-translationally, and is specifically and significantly (P < 0.001) accelerated by the GroEL-GroES chaperonin complex. This demonstrates a new active mechanism for this molecular chaperone and suggests that chaperonin-catalyzed knotting probably dominates in vivo. These results explain how knotted protein structures have withstood evolutionary pressures despite their topological complexity.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.