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Biology subjects

Sankar, D. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Sankar, D. S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

The Human Bindome: A Proteome-scale Atlas of Designed Binder Candidates

Affinity reagents such as antibodies are indispensable for interrogating proteins biological function. Yet they are costly and frequently unreliable, with unknown sequences, posing challenges to reproducible experimental research. Deep learning-based protein design can now in silico generate affinity reagents achieving reliable experimental success rates, but has remained largely confined to specialist laboratories. Here we present the Human Bindome, a proteome-scale atlas of high-confidence in silico protein binder candidates. By embedding the experimentally benchmarked BindCraft method in an accelerated, parallelized framework with automated domain-level target selection, we generated 306,146 binder candidates covering 8,296 human proteins (40.9% of the full proteome). Every candidate carries a defined sequence, a predicted binder-target structure model, and in silico confidence metrics. We characterize proteome-wide coverage and show that binder epitopes frequently overlap functional sites. This positions the Bindome as a resource of genetically encodable perturbagens for site-specific, modular control of protein function. The Bindome is freely available through a web interface (https://bindome.epfl.ch), with agentic, natural-language querying and as data splits for machine-learning model development. We anticipate that the Bindome will be valuable for the scientific community by providing affinity and perturbation reagents with broad applications in dissecting biological mechanisms as well as in drug and target discovery.

synthetic biology↗

Selective autophagy of ribosomes balances a tradeoff between starvation survival and growth resumption

Animals facing fluctuating food availability must balance survival during starvation with rapid resumption of growth when encountering food. We investigated how proteome turnover and remodelling through autophagy influences this trade-off in C. elegans L1 larvae by combining live imaging and proteomics. Starvation triggered an autophagy-dependent, disproportionate loss of ribosomal and other growth-related proteins. Residual ribosomal protein abundance at the end of starvation predicted the rate of growth recovery of individual animals during post-starvation feeding, linking proteome-scale changes to organism-scale life-history. Hyperactivation of the mTORC1 regulator RAGA-1 preserved ribosomal proteins, accelerated recovery after short starvation, but reduced survival under prolonged starvation. These findings identify autophagy-dependent ribosomal protein decline as a central component of starvation-induced proteome remodelling and reveal its role in balancing the trade-off between starvation endurance and recovery speed in a multicellular animal.

physiology↗

Collagen constitutes about twelve percent in females and seventeen percent in males of the total protein in mice

Collagen has been postulated to be the most abundant protein in our body, making up one-third of the total protein content in mammals. However, to the best of our knowledge, a direct assessment of the total collagen levels of an entire mammal to confirm this estimate is missing. Here we measured hydroxyproline levels as a proxy for collagen content together with total protein levels of entire mice or of individual tissues. Collagen content normalized to the total protein is approximately 0.1% in the brain and liver, 1% in the heart and kidney, 4% in the muscle and lung, 6% in the colon, 20-40% in the skin, 25-35% in bones, and 40-50% in tendons of wild-type (CD1 and CB57BL/6) mice, consistent with previous reports. Mice consist of 37 mg of collagen and 265 mg of protein per g of body weight. To our surprise, we find that collagen is approximately 12% in females and 17% in males of the total protein content of entire wild-type (CD1 and CB57BL/6) mice. High-Performance Liquid Chromatography approaches confirmed a 10-12% collagen over total protein estimates for female mice. Collagen staining methods and extracellular matrix-enriched proteomics estimated 5-6% of collagens over the total protein extracted. Although collagen type I is the most abundant collagen, the most abundant proteins are albumin, hemoglobulin, histones, actin, serpina, and then collagen type I. Analyzing amino acid compositions of mice revealed glycine as the most abundant amino acid. Thus, we provide reference points for collagen, matrisome, protein, and amino acid composition of healthy wild-type mice that are important for tissue and biomaterial engineering and for the comparison of these factors in various disease models.

molecular biology↗