1. |
- Light, Sara, et al.
(author)
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Long indels are disordered : A study of disorder and indels in homologous eukaryotic proteins
- 2013
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In: Biochimica et Biophysica Acta - Proteins and Proteomics. - : Elsevier BV. - 1570-9639 .- 1878-1454. ; 1834:5, s. 890-897
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Proteins evolve through point mutations as well as by insertions and deletions (indels). During the last decade it has become apparent that protein regions that do not fold into three-dimensional structures, i.e. intrinsically disordered regions, are quite common. Here, we have studied the relationship between protein disorder and indels using HMM-HMM pairwise alignments in two sets of orthologous eukaryotic protein pairs. First, we show that disordered residues are much more frequent among indel residues than among aligned residues and, also are more prevalent among indels than in coils. Second, we observed that disordered residues are particularly common in longer indels. Disordered indels of short-to-medium size are prevalent in the non-terminal regions of proteins while the longest indels, ordered and disordered alike, occur toward the termini of the proteins where new structural units are comparatively well tolerated. Finally, while disordered regions often evolve faster than ordered regions and disorder is common in indels, there are some previously recognized protein families where the disordered region is more conserved than the ordered region. We find that these rare proteins are often involved in information processes, such as RNA processing and translation. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: The emerging dynamic view of proteins: Protein plasticity in allostery, evolution and self-assembly.
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2. |
- Light, Sara, et al.
(author)
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The evolution of filamin - A protein domain repeat perspective
- 2012
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In: Journal of Structural Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 1047-8477 .- 1095-8657. ; 179:3, s. 289-298
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Particularly in higher eukaryotes, some protein domains are found in tandem repeats, performing broad functions often related to cellular organization. For instance, the eukaryotic protein filamin interacts with many proteins and is crucial for the cytoskeleton. The functional properties of long repeat domains are governed by the specific properties of each individual domain as well as by the repeat copy number. To provide better understanding of the evolutionary and functional history of repeating domains, we investigated the mode of evolution of the filamin domain in some detail. Among the domains that are common in long repeat proteins, sushi and spectrin domains evolve primarily through cassette tandem duplications while scavenger and immunoglobulin repeats appear to evolve through clustered tandem duplications. Additionally, immunoglobulin and filamin repeats exhibit a unique pattern where every other domain shows high sequence similarity. This pattern may be the result of tandem duplications, serve to avert aggregation between adjacent domains or it is the result of functional constraints. In filamin, our studies confirm the presence of interspersed integrin binding domains in vertebrates, while invertebrates exhibit more varied patterns, including more clustered integrin binding domains. The most notable case is leech filamin, which contains a 20 repeat expansion and exhibits unique dimerization topology. Clearly, invertebrate filamins are varied and contain examples of similar adjacent integrin-binding domains. Given that invertebrate integrin shows more similarity to the weaker filamin binder, integrin beta 3, it is possible that the distance between integrin-binding domains is not as crucial for invertebrate filamins as for vertebrates.
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3. |
- Sagit, Rauan, 1985-, et al.
(author)
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Protein expansion is primarily due to indels in intrinsically disordered regions
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Proteins evolve not only through point mutations but also by insertion and deletion events, which affect the length of the protein. It is well known that such indel events most frequently occur in surface exposed loops. However, detailed analysis of indel events in distantly related proteins is hampered by the difficulty involved in correctly aligning such sequences. Here, we circumvent this problem by analyzing homologous proteins based on length variation rather than pairwise alignments. We find a surprisingly strong relationship between difference in length and difference in the number of intrinsically disordered residues, where more than half of the length variation can be explained by changes in the number of intrinsically disordered residues. A more detailed analysis reveals that indel events do not induce disorder but rather that already disordered regions accrue indels, suggesting that there is a significantly lowered selective pressure for indels to occur within intrinsically disordered regions.
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4. |
- Sagit, Rauan, 1985-
(author)
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Variation in length of proteins by repeats and disorder regions
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Protein-coding genes evolve together with their genome and acquire changes, some of which affect the length of their protein products. This explains why equivalent proteins from different species can exhibit length differences. Variation in length of proteins during evolution arguably presents a large number of possibilities for improvement and innovation of protein structure and function. In order to contribute to an increased understanding of this process, we have studied variation caused by tandem domain duplications and insertions or deletions of intrinsically disordered residues.The study of two proteins, Nebulin and Filamin, together with a broader study of long repeat proteins (>10 domain repeats), began by confirming that tandem domains evolve by internal duplications. Next, we show that vertebrate Nebulins evolved by duplications of a seven-domain unit, yet the most recent duplications utilized different gene parts as duplication units. However, Filamin exhibits a checkered duplication pattern, indicating that duplications were followed by similarity erosions that were hindered at particular domains due to the presence of equivalent binding motifs. For long repeat proteins, we found that human segmental duplications are over-represented in long repeat genes. Additionally, domains that have formed long repeats achieved this primarily by duplications of two or more domains at a time.The study of homologous protein pairs from the well-characterized eukaryotes nematode, fruit fly and several fungi, demonstrated a link between variation in length and variation in the number of intrinsically disordered residues. Next, insertions and deletions (indels) estimated from HMM-HMM pairwise alignments showed that disordered residues are clearly more frequent among indel than non-indel residues. Additionally, a study of raw length differences showed that more than half of the variation in fungi proteins is composed of disordered residues. Finally, a model of indels and their immediate surroundings suggested that disordered indels occur in already disordered regions rather than in ordered regions.
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