MOLECULAR MODELING AND STRUCTURE-BASED THERMODYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF THE StAR PROTEIN
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although much progress has been achieved in the study of the steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR) dependent cholesterol transfer inside mitochondria, not one mechanism can account for all experimental data obtained to date. We have thus investigated the possibility that molecular modeling and structure-based thermodynamic calculations (STC) could enlighten these discrepancies. Starting from the crystallographic data of the human MLN64, a StAR homology model was generated and subjected to STC to verify the importance of StAR structural alterations for proper function. As expected, the model resembled the MLN64 crystal, although no binding site "tunnel" was obtained. Instead, a closed cavity was discovered, approximately the size and shape of cholesterol. This suggests that StAR does indeed require structural alterations to allow cholesterol binding, most evidently by the C-terminal alpha-helix above the U-shaped beta-barrel. Through STC, it is shown that unfolding of this helix is probable and leads to a 2% subpopulation of partially unfolded StAR, supportive of both the intermembrane shuttle and the molten globule hypotheses.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".