Alpha-synuclein is an intensely studied intrinsically disordered protein whose aggregation into amyloid fibrils is connected to the progression of several neurodegenerative diseases, most commonly Parkinson’s Disease. A remarkable feature that has emerged from this research is how easy it is to induce the protein to aggregate in vitro into a wide range of amyloid fibrils that appear to resemble the aggregates found in Lewy bodies in diseases like Parkinson’s while at the same time how difficult it is to produce aggregates whose fold truly represents the disease-associated amyloids at the atomic level. In an effort to produce the disease-relevant fibrils in vitro we have analyzed over 60 independent samples by cryo-electron microscopy using helical reconstruction to obtain atomic resolution models for most of the samples. While not yet achieving our original goal, we have found that several overlooked parameters influence the structural outcomes of alpha-synuclein aggregation, in particular protein purity, preparation of the monomeric starting material and agitation method.
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
This study investigates how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies and identifies its enablers and inhibitors, and shows the potential of the method-in-action framework to investigate the Lean startup approach in non-startup context.
Henry Edison, Nina M. Smørsgård, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 78 citations· ⚡6
This paper highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology, provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory, and proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.
D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· SSE@SIGSOFT FSE· 56 citations· ⚡4
This study conducts a multiple case study on twenty European software startups and proposes a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups, and identifies factors that occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in earlystage software startups.
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 44 citations· ⚡5
It is demonstrated that linker-free PROTACs can outperform traditional designs, marking a paradigm shift in PROTAC development for targeted protein degradation.
Pinal, a 16-billion-parameter foundation model that produces protein candidates from natural-language functional descriptions, supports natural language as a high-level interface for candidate generation in protein design, enabling programmable exploration with reduced reliance on manually specified structural or seque...
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
