Introduction
A dehydron is a protein backbone hydrogen bond incompletely shielded from water attack. A desolvated hydrogen bond is energetically more favourable than one exposed to the solvent and hence dehydrons are sticky , since they promote the removal of surrounding water through protein associations or ligand binding.
Dehydrons are less conserved than other structural motifs, hence identification of dehydrons could help to increase specificity during the rational drug design process. Certain proteins are enriched in dehydrons such as membrane proteins, toxic proteins and proteins that have a strong tendency to aggregate. Dehydrons have been invoked to explain biological processes above the molecular level such as the dosage imbalance effect in duplicated genes and the high connectivity of the protein interactomes of higher organisms.
A putative dehydron can be detected by ..→
