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Cooperativity and biological complexity

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Cooperative binding effects pervade biology. Only a few basic principles are at play, but in different biological contexts cooperativity appears in distinct guises to achieve different ends. Here I discuss some of the manifestations of cooperativity that are most important in biology and drug discovery as they pertain to systems at different levels of complexity and also highlight aspects of this broadly important phenomenon that remain poorly understood.

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Figure 1: Allosteric versus configurational cooperativity.
Figure 2: Advancing fragment hits by linking.
Figure 3: Cooperative assembly of a multimolecular complex.
Figure 4: Cooperativity due to colocalization on the cell membrane.

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  1. Adrian Whitty is in the Department of Chemistry, Boston University, Metcalf Center for Science and Engineering, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215-2521, USA. whitty@bu.edu,

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Whitty, A. Cooperativity and biological complexity. Nat Chem Biol 4, 435–439 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio0808-435

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