Sense and respond

Abstract

Protein Design Many signaling pathways start with cellular proteins sensing and responding to small molecules. Despite advances in protein design, creating a protein-based sense-and-respond system remains challenging. Glasgow et al. designed binding sites at the interface of protein heterodimers (see the Perspective by Chica). By fusing each monomer to one half of a split reporter, they linked ligand-driven dimerization to the reporter output. The computational design strategy provides a generalizable approach to create synthetic sensing systems with different outputs. Science , this issue p. [1024][1]; see also p. [952][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aax8780 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaz8085