A New Theoretical Approach to Allostery |Biomedgrid

Allosteric process isn't new, but recently it has acquired even greater application prominence. In a recent review Exploring allostery's advantages on this phenomenon, [1] (C&EN Chicago) says “drug hunters are increasingly turning their attention to allosteric sites – the often tough-to-find regulatory pockets. A crop of allostery-focused biotech has emerged to illuminate proteins' hidden sites with a combination of better experimental and computational tools”. By a theoretical point of view, moreover, the concept of allostery can also assume a larger definition. For a generic macromolecule, allostery can be defined as the alteration of a property in its active site due to a perturbation generated in its sensor (allosteric) site. Following this definition, hence, at the normal way of identifying the “active” and the “allosteric” sites of a macromolecule, we must add the primary question of characterizing the movement of this perturbation in the macromolecule.