Design of facilitated dissociation enables control over cytokine signaling duration.

The article discusses a new approach to protein design that focuses on creating excited states to control the duration of cytokine signaling. By inducing a structurally frustrated and strained excited state, protein complex dissociation can be allosterically driven, leading to significant increases in dissociation rates. This design strategy has been demonstrated to allow for effector-induced increases in dissociation rates as high as 6000-fold, with potential applications in designing cytokine mimics that can dissociate from their receptors within seconds. The research is available as a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. [Extracted from the article]