Professor of #StructuralBiology @karolinskainst.bsky.social studying #egg-#sperm interaction at #fertilization & #ZonaPellucida (ZP) module proteins
Member of #EMBO & the #NobelAssembly at Karolinska Institutet
More @ http://jovinelab.org
Luca Jovine
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Fun to talk about how #AlphaFold and #ROCKET can help #crystallography and #cryoEM studies of #fertilization at this year's American Society of Andrology meeting in Phoenix!
andrologysociety.org/annual-meeti...
#ASA #reproductivebiology #andrology
Luca Jovine
This underscores the overall conservation of egg coat filament structure.
Having a blast at XI NAZIONALE SIERR 2026 meeting in #Rome, with @enricabianchi.bsky.social and many other excellent italian scientists!
www.sierr.it/eventi/xi-co...
Together with Suresh Banjara and Hiroki Okumura, I'd like to again thank @alisiafadini.bsky.social, @moalquraishi.bsky.social and the whole #ROCKET team - as well as @vetenskapsradet.bsky.social and @kawresearch.bsky.social for supporting our part of the work!
Despite containing an EGF domain and forming homopolymers like urinary ZP module protein #uromodulin (PDB 6TQK), the ZPD filament resembles more closely the ZP3/ZP1 heteropolymer, whose structure we recently determined by #crystallography (PDB 8RKI, 8BQU).
Very happy to have had a chance to attack an initially very low-resolution #cryo-EM map with #ROCKET! Thank you again @alisiafadini.bsky.social and all other co-authors of this important work, which truly shows the power of combining experimental structural biology and #AI inference.
rdcu.be/fa9YH
Ultimately, this helped us determine the first cryo-EM structure of a native vertebrate egg coat filament (www.rcsb.org/structure/28YJ):
Starting from an #AlphaFold-Multimer prediction, we used #ROCKET to build a model of ZPD, a homopolymeric zona pellucida (#ZP) protein, into an initial #cryo-EM map at only ~9 Å resolution. A subsequently obtained 4.6 Å map highlighted how superior the ROCKET model was over the initial prediction:
Nice to see our work on #ZP2-targeted female nonhormonal #contraception featured in today's @lemonde.fr:
www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...
Merci Juliette Baëza!
Original @pnas.org paper → www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
