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Nature Methods 5, 996 (1 December 2008) | doi:10.1038/nmeth1208-996

Hotwiring protein regulation

Michael Eisenstein

The principle of allosteric regulation, in which ligand-binding at one protein site triggers functional changes at another remotely positioned site, is familiar even to beginning students of biology. However, the underlying physical mechanisms of allosteric regulation remain largely mysterious, and much of what is known is a result of the painstaking analysis of individual proteins.