Patent Pending
Rapid virus evolution generates proteins essential to infectivity and replication but with unknown function due to extreme sequence divergence. Using a database of 67,715 newly predicted protein structures from 4,463 eukaryotic viral species, it was found that 62% of viral proteins are structurally distinct and lack homologs in the Alphafold database. Structural comparisons suggested putative functions for >25% of unannotated viral proteins.
UC Berkeley researcher have created new single stranded DNA (ssDNA) binding
proteins and double stranded (dsDNA) binding proteins, and methods and compositions for using them, such as binding to target DNA.