Multimodal allostery in a single-domain protein
- 1Department of Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, An
Abstract
Allosteric communication between distant sites in proteins is central to biological regulation and underlies the efficacy of many drugs. Allostery allows proteins to function as molecular switches, with their activities controlled by ligand binding, covalent modifications, and mutations outside their active sites. Allosteric maps have been constructed for several proteins, but these all quantify regulation of a single site in each protein. How the allosteric maps of different sites compare is unclear. Here, we address this question by charting complete allosteric maps for two structurally distant binding sites in the oncoprotein KRAS. Unexpectedly, these maps reveal three different forms of allosteric control, that we term coupled, anti-coupled and independent allostery. Allostery in this small protein is therefore complex and multimodal. The co-existence of multiple allosteric networks in a single-domain protein has important conceptual implications and, if widespread, may allow the development of new classes of therapeutics that not only modulate targets but also tune their functional outputs.
Related
- Scalable Contact-Gated Stochastic Operators and Universal Reduction Laws for Macromolecular Protein Dynamics, Allostery, and Kinetics
- Sequence‐encoded dynamics diversify allostery within a conserved protein scaffold
- Directional information flow as a tool for analyzing protein allostery
- AlloPool is a deep learning framework that infers protein allostery from molecular dynamics simulations
- Characterisation of an evolutionarily conserved RNaseH-like domain in a domesticated transposase-derived protein
BibTeX
@misc{ma2026multimodal,
title = {{Multimodal allostery in a single-domain protein}},
author = {Y. Ma and Q. Jin and B. Lehner and C. Weng},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.14.750605},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.14.750605v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Multimodal allostery in a single-domain protein
AU - Y. Ma
AU - Q. Jin
AU - B. Lehner
AU - C. Weng
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.14.750605
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.14.750605v1
AB - Allosteric communication between distant sites in proteins is central to biological regulation and underlies the efficacy of many drugs. Allostery allows proteins to function as molecular switches, with their activities controlled by ligand binding, covalent modifications, and mutations outside their active sites. Allosteric maps have been constructed for several proteins, but these all quantify regulation of a single site in each protein. How the allosteric maps of different sites compare is unclear. Here, we address this question by charting complete allosteric maps for two structurally distant binding sites in the oncoprotein KRAS. Unexpectedly, these maps reveal three different forms of allosteric control, that we term coupled, anti-coupled and independent allostery. Allostery in this small protein is therefore complex and multimodal. The co-existence of multiple allosteric networks in a single-domain protein has important conceptual implications and, if widespread, may allow the development of new classes of therapeutics that not only modulate targets but also tune their functional outputs.
ER -