The crystal structure of an octapeptide repeat of the Prion protein in complex with a Fab fragment of the POM2 antibody
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prion diseases are progressive, infectious neurodegenerative disorders caused primarily by the misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrP(c)) into an insoluble, protease-resistant, aggregated isoform termed PrP(sc). In native conditions, PrP(c) has a structured C-terminal domain and a highly flexible N-terminal domain. A part of this N-terminal domain consists of 4-5 repeats of an unusual glycine-rich, eight amino acids long peptide known as the octapeptide repeat (OR) domain. In this article, we successfully report the first crystal structure of an OR of PrP(c) bound to the Fab fragment of the POM2 antibody. The structure was solved at a resolution of 2.3 Å by molecular replacement. Although several studies have previously predicted a β-turn-like structure of the unbound ORs, our structure shows an extended conformation of the OR when bound to a molecule of the POM2 Fab indicating that the bound Fab disrupts any putative native β turn conformation of the ORs. Encouraging results from several recent studies have shown that administering small molecule ligands or antibodies targeting the OR domain of PrP result in arresting the progress of peripheral prion infections both in ex vivo and in in vivo models. This makes the structural study of the interactions of POM2 Fab with the OR domain very important as it would help us to design smaller and tighter binding OR ligands.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".