Antiviral Proteins in Structural Context: MDA5 and hOAS1

Abstract

In the following chapters, we looked at two antiviral proteins: MDA5 and hOAS1. Understanding their mechanisms from a structural perspective would give us greater insight into how they are supposed to function and the implications of their proper functioning in pathways other than the antiviral pathway, as in our MDA5 N-terminal studies (Chapter 1), as well as the consequences of improper function, which we considered in the constitutively active OAS mutant study (Chapter 2). We encountered difficulties in crystallization of the N-terminal MDA5 CARDs and in designing successful constitutively hOAS1 mutants, but our results are informative and add to the understanding of the way these two proteins operate as a whole.