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Elsevier, Biochimie, (113), p. 54-58, 2015

DOI: 10.1016/j.biochi.2015.03.018

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Taming molecular flexibility to tackle rare diseases

Journal article published in 2015 by Maria Vittoria Cubellis ORCID, Marc Baaden ORCID, Giuseppina Andreotti
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Many mutations responsible of Fabry disease destabilize lysosomal alpha-galactosidase, but retain the enzymatic activity. These mutations are associated to a milder phenotype and are potentially curable with a pharmacological therapy either with chaperones or with drugs that modulate proteostasis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of molecular dynamics simulations to correlate the genotype to the severity of the disease. We studied the relation between protein flexibility and residual enzymatic activity of pathological missense mutants in the cell. We found that mutations occurring at flexible sites are likely to retain activity in vivo. The usefulness of molecular dynamics for diagnostic purposes is not limited to lysosomal galactosidase because destabilizing mutations are widely encountered in other proteins, too, and represent a large share of all the ones associated to human diseases.