Protein dimerization is a crucial biological process in which proteins interact, as for example homo- or hetero-dimers, to form a functional assembly. In fact, proteins rarely show function and activity in their isolated form in a biological environment. The self-assembly of proteins to form dimers or higher oligomeric aggregates is a common biophysical phenomenon, which occurs in every cellular compartment such as cell membranes, the nucleus, and the cytosol. All cellular pathways such as enzymatic activation, signal transduction and even pathogenic pathways are significantly regulated via protein dimerization. Regulation of protein dimerization is an essential process for the growth and development of organisms under the stimuli of intrinsic or extrinsic factors in the natural environment. The folding of multisubunit proteins is of tremendous biological significance since the large majority of proteins exist as protein–protein complexes. Extensive experimental and computational studies have provided fundamental insights into the principles of folding of small monomeric proteins. Recently, important advances have been made in extending folding studies to multisubunit proteins, in particular homodimeric proteins. Although various principles identified for monomer folding also apply to the folding of dimeric proteins, the effects of subunit association can manifest in complex ways, and are frequently overlooked. Changes in molecularity typically give rise to very different overall folding behaviour than is observed for monomeric proteins. The results obtained for dimers have provided key insights pertinent to understanding biological assembly and regulation of multisubunit proteins. Here you can see an example of a tightly packed dimer, illustrated by the x-ray structure of the C-terminal dimerization domain of infectious bronchitis virus nucleocapsid protein (PDB code: 2GE7)

#molecularart ... #dimer ... #dimerization ... #domain ... #interaction ... #virus... #xray

Structure rendered with @proteinimaging and depicted with @corelphotopaint