Ron Hills publishes paper in Journal of Molecular Biology

Ron Hills, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry, UNE College of Pharmacy, coauthored a paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology in collaboration with the lab of Jamie Williamson, dean of graduate studies at the Scripps Research Institute. The research article is titled 'Structure of the NXF2/NXT1 heterodimeric complex reveals combined specificity and versatility of the NTF2-like fold' [J. Mol. Biol. 2012, 415, 649-65].

The culmination of a doctoral thesis by Don Kerkow, the study employed X-ray crystallography to solve the first reported structure of a nuclear transport protein from C. elegans in complex with its binding partner. Nuclear export factors are involved in the bulk export of mRNA from the nucleus as well as specific RNA regulation. Structural and biochemical analyses suggest that the family of transport proteins are able to carry out diverse functions by combining aspects of structural complementarity with flexible induced fit.
 

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