Bibliographic record
Abstract
We hypothesize that we can exploit what Nature has already evolved by manipulating the alpha-helix molecular recognition scaffold. Therefore, minimalist proteins capable of sequence-specific, high-affinity binding of DNA were generated to probe how proteins are used and can be used to recognize DNA. The already minimal basic region/leucine zipper motif (bZIP) of GCN4 was reduced to an even more simplified structure by substitution with alanine residues-hence, a generic, Ala-based, helical scaffold. The proteins generated, wt bZIP, 4A, 11A, and 18A, contain 0, 4, 11, and 18 alanine mutations in their DNA-binding basic regions, respectively. All alanine mutants still retain alpha-helical structure and DNA-binding function, despite loss of virtually all Coulombic protein-DNA interactions. Mass spectrometry allowed characterization of proteins and post-translational modifications. Fluorescence anisotropy and DNase I footprinting were used to measure in situ binding of these mutant proteins to DNA duplexes containing target sites AP-1 (5'-TGACTCA-3'), ATF/CREB (5'-TGACGTCA-3'), or nonspecific DNA. The roles of van der Waals and Coulombic interactions toward binding specificity and affinity are being investigated. Thus, both DNA-binding specificity and affinity are maintained in all our bZIP derivatives. This Ala-rich scaffold may be useful in design and synthesis of small, alpha-helical proteins with desired DNA-recognition properties.
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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".