Recent work from the Malvankar lab at the Yale Microbial Sciences Institute has been selected as Molecule of the Month by Protein Data Bank. The data center hosts the global Protein Data Bank archive of 3D structure data for large biological molecules essential for research in fundamental biology, health, energy, and biotechnology.
The honor highlights publications in Nature and Cell by the team of Nikhil Malvankar, Associate Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale School of Medicine. Their findings reveal the molecular basis underlying how the bacterium Geobacter forms nanowires that conduct electrons within biological molecules. Nanowires are composed of long strings of cytochrome proteins, each with a collection of electron-carrying heme cofactors. The work also emphasizes properties of nanowire biogenesis that are widespread across diverse species and environments and that hold implications for the design of synthetic protein nanowires.