Study reveals atomic structure of tropoelastin, showing what goes wrong in some diseases.
The stretchiness that allows living tissues to expand, contract, stretch, and bend throughout a lifetime is the result of a protein molecule called tropoelastin. Remarkably, this molecule can be stretched to eight times its length and always returns back to its original size.
Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the molecular structure of this complex molecule, as well as the details of what can go wrong with its structure in various genetically driven diseases.
Tropoelastin is the precursor molecule of elastin, which along with structures called microfibrils is the key to flexibility of tissues including skin, lungs, and blood vessels. But the molecule is complex, made up of 698 amino acids in sequence and filled with disordered regions, so unravelling its structure has been a major challenge for science.
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