Dear Zhang Lab, or anyone else reading this:
I'm trying to use I-TASSER to predict whether a given missense mutation that a patient suffers from will cause the protein to be misfolded and thus degraded by the proteasome and appear in very low endogenous levels. This is in contrast to other missense mutations that may cause the protein to not function well, but the protein doesn't seem to be degraded by the proteasome and it appears at fairly normal levels, something I've seen by Western blot.
Computing the structural changes caused by both types of mutations with the online server-side version of I-TASSER yielded no differences, both types of mutations cause very subtle changes to the predicted protein structure, nothing conclusive. So I was just wondering if someone here has more experience with computing missense mutation structural changes, and if there are settings or changes I can make to the Perl client-side distribution of I-TASSER that may let me compute and really distinguish between the two different fates of missense mutated proteins, or if there is software out there better suited for the task.
Thank you very much for your time and insight,
Calvin Jary Alex MacKenzie lab
M.Sc. Candidate CHEO Research Institute I
Medicine.uOttawa