scholarly journals Defensin-like peptide-2 from platypus venom: member of a class of peptides with a distinct structural fold

2000 ◽  
Vol 348 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan M. TORRES ◽  
Greg M. DE PLATER ◽  
Magnus DOVERSKOG ◽  
Liesl C. BIRINYI-STRACHAN ◽  
Graham M. NICHOLSON ◽  
...  

The venom of the male Australian duck-billed platypus contains a family of four polypeptides of appox. 5 kDa, which are referred to as defensin-like peptides (DLPs). They are unique in that their amino acid sequences have no significant similarities to those of any known peptides; however, the tertiary structure of one of them, DLP-1, has recently been shown to be similar to β-defensin-12 and to the sodium neurotoxin peptide ShI (Stichodactyla helianthus neurotoxin I). Although DLPs are the major peptides in the platypus venom, little is known about their biological roles. In this study, we determined the three-dimensional structure of DLP-2 by NMR spectroscopy, with the aim of gaining insights into the natural function of the DLPs in platypus venom. The DLP-2 structure was found to incorporate a short helix that spans residues 9-12, and an antiparallel β-sheet defined by residues 15-18 and 37-40. The overall fold and cysteine-pairing pattern of DLP-2 were found to be similar to those of DLP-1, and hence β-defensin-12; however, the sequence similarities between the three molecules are relatively small. The distinct structural fold of the DLP-1, DLP-2, and β-defensin-12 is based upon several key residues that include six cysteines. DLP-3 and DLP-4 are also likely to be folded similarly since they have high sequence similarity with DLP-2. The DLPs, and β-defensin-12 may thus be grouped together into a class of polypeptide molecules which have a common or very similar global fold. The fact that the DLPs did not display antimicrobial, myotoxic, or cell-growth-promoting activities implies that the nature of the side chains in this group of peptides is likely to play an important role in defining the biological function(s).

Functional studies on interferon would be helped by a three-dimensional structure for the molecule. However, it may be several years before the structure of the protein is determined by X-ray crystallography. We have therefore used available methods for predicting the secondary - and the tertiary - structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence to propose a tertiary model involving the packing of four a-helices. Details of this work have been published elsewhere (Sternberg & Cohen 1982).


Reproduction ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 13-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
WG Breed ◽  
RM Hope ◽  
OW Wiebkin ◽  
SC Spargo ◽  
JA Chapman

In this review, the biochemical composition and structural organization of the marsupial and eutherian zonae pellucidae are compared. Differences between the zonae from these two groups of mammals are observed in their response to dilute proteases and reducing agents, in their potential glycosylation patterns, and in some of their functions. However, studies on the glycoconjugates and polypeptides of the three zona pellucida genes have not explained these different responses to the proteases and reducing agents. There is high sequence similarity between the zona polypeptides of marsupials and eutherians, as well as a similarity in the oligosaccharides present, as demonstrated by lectin staining. As the marsupial and eutherian lineages diverged from a common ancestor over 100 million years ago, these observations indicate that the three-dimensional structure of these glycoproteins is highly conserved throughout all mammals, although the complexity of its molecular organization has yet to be resolved. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that there are at least four groups of paralogous zona pellucida genes in vertebrates. The marsupial ZPA and ZPB genes have been named in accordance with their orthologues but the phylogenetic relationships of the marsupial ZPC gene require further investigation.


Author(s):  
Ahmad Alali ◽  
Lin Zhang ◽  
Jianyu Li ◽  
Chijian Zuo ◽  
Dimah Wassouf ◽  
...  

AbstractRishirilides are a group of PKS II secondary metabolites produced by Streptomyces bottropensis Gö C4/4. Biosynthetic studies in the past have elucidated early and late steps of rishirilide biosynthesis. This work is aiming to solve the remaining steps in the rishirilide biosynthesis. Inactivation of the cyclase gene rslC3 in Streptomyces bottropensis resulted in an interruption of rishirilide production. Instead, accumulation of the tricyclic aromatic galvaquinones was observed. Similar results were observed after deletion of rslO4. Closer inspection into RslO4 crystal structure in addition to site-directed mutagenesis and molecular dynamic simulations revealed that RslO4 might be responsible for quinone formation on the third ring. The RslO1 three-dimensional structure shows a high similarity to FMN-dependent luciferase-like monooxygenases such as the epoxy-forming MsnO8 which acts with the flavin reductase MsnO3 in mensacarcin biosynthesis in the same strain. The high sequence similarity between RslO2 and MsnO3 suggests that RslO2 provides RslO1 with reduced FMN to form an epoxide that serves as substrate for RslO5.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciano Kagami ◽  
Joel Roca-Martínez ◽  
Jose Gavaldá-García ◽  
Pathmanaban Ramasamy ◽  
K. Anton Feenstra ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, consists of an assembly of proteins that determine its infectious and immunological behavior, as well as its response to therapeutics. Major structural biology efforts on these proteins have already provided essential insights into the mode of action of the virus, as well as avenues for structure-based drug design. However, not all of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins, or regions thereof, have a well-defined three-dimensional structure, and as such might exhibit ambiguous, dynamic behaviour that is not evident from static structure representations, nor from molecular dynamics simulations using these structures. Main We present a website (https://bio2byte.be/sars2/) that provides protein sequence-based predictions of the backbone and side-chain dynamics and conformational propensities of these proteins, as well as derived early folding, disorder, β-sheet aggregation, protein-protein interaction and epitope propensities. These predictions attempt to capture the inherent biophysical propensities encoded in the sequence, rather than context-dependent behaviour such as the final folded state. In addition, we provide the biophysical variation that is observed in homologous proteins, which gives an indication of the limits of their functionally relevant biophysical behaviour. Conclusion The https://bio2byte.be/sars2/ website provides a range of protein sequence-based predictions for 27 SARS-CoV-2 proteins, enabling researchers to form hypotheses about their possible functional modes of action.


2003 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 623-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Y. Torshin ◽  
Robert W. Harrison

How a unique three-dimensional structure is rapidly formed from the linear sequence of a polypeptide is one of the important questions in contemporary science. Apart from biological context ofin vivoprotein folding (which has been studied only for a few proteins), the roles of the fundamental physical forces in thein vitrofolding remain largely unstudied. Despite a degree of success in using descriptions based on statistical and/or thermodynamic approaches, few of the current models explicitly include more basic physical forces (such as electrostatics and Van Der Waals forces). Moreover, the present-day models rarely take into account that the protein folding is, essentially, a rapid process that produces a highly specific architecture. This review considers several physical models that may provide more direct links between sequence and tertiary structure in terms of the physical forces. In particular, elaboration of such simple models is likely to produce extremely effective computational techniques with value for modern genomics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Uus Saepuloh ◽  
Diah Iskandriati ◽  
Joko Pamungkas ◽  
Dedy Duryadi Solihin ◽  
Sela Septima Mariya ◽  
...  

Simian betaretrovirus serotype-2 (SRV-2) is an important pathogenic agent in Asian macaques. It is a potential confounding variable in biomedical research. SRV-2 also provides a valuable viral model compared to other retroviruses which can be used for understanding many aspects of retroviral-host interactions and immunosuppression, infection mechanism, retroviral structure, antiretroviral and vaccine development. In this study, we isolated the gene encoding reverse transcriptase enzyme (RT) of SRV-2 that infected Indonesian cynomolgus monkey (Mf ET1006) and predicted the three dimensional structure model using the iterative threading assembly refinement (I-TASSER) computational programme. This SRV-2 RT Mf ET1006 consisted of 547 amino acids at nucleotide position 3284–4925 of whole genome SRV-2. The polymerase active site located in the finger/palm subdomain characterised by three conserved catalytic aspartates (Asp90, Asp165, Asp166), and has a highly conserved YMDD motif as Tyr163, Met164, Asp165 and Asp166. We estimated that this SRV-2 RT Mf ET1006 structure has the accuracy of template modelling score (TM-score 0.90 ± 0.06) and root mean square deviation (RMSD) 4.7 ± 3.1Å, indicating that this model can be trusted and the accuracy can be seen from the appearance of protein folding in tertiary structure. The superpositionings between SRV-2 RT Mf ET1006 and Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) RT were performed to predict the structural in details and to optimise the best fits for illustrations. This SRV-2 RT Mf ET1006 structure model has the highest homology to HIV-1 RT (2B6A.pdb) with estimated accuracy at TM-score 0.911, RMSD 1.85 Å, and coverage of 0.953. This preliminary study of SRV-2 RT Mf ET1006 structure modelling is intriguing and provide some information to explore the molecular characteristic and biochemical mechanism of this enzyme.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Shimagaki ◽  
Martin Weigt

Statistical models for families of evolutionary related proteins have recently gained interest: in particular pairwise Potts models, as those inferred by the Direct-Coupling Analysis, have been able to extract information about the three-dimensional structure of folded proteins, and about the effect of amino-acid substitutions in proteins. These models are typically requested to reproduce the one- and two-point statistics of the amino-acid usage in a protein family, i.e. to capture the so-called residue conservation and covariation statistics of proteins of common evolutionary origin. Pairwise Potts models are the maximum-entropy models achieving this. While being successful, these models depend on huge numbers of ad hoc introduced parameters, which have to be estimated from finite amount of data and whose biophysical interpretation remains unclear. Here we propose an approach to parameter reduction, which is based on selecting collective sequence motifs. It naturally leads to the formulation of statistical sequence models in terms of Hopfield-Potts models. These models can be accurately inferred using a mapping to restricted Boltzmann machines and persistent contrastive divergence. We show that, when applied to protein data, even 20-40 patterns are sufficient to obtain statistically close-to-generative models. The Hopfield patterns form interpretable sequence motifs and may be used to clusterize amino-acid sequences into functional sub-families. However, the distributed collective nature of these motifs intrinsically limits the ability of Hopfield-Potts models in predicting contact maps, showing the necessity of developing models going beyond the Hopfield-Potts models discussed here.


Author(s):  
Arun G. Ingale

To predict the structure of protein from a primary amino acid sequence is computationally difficult. An investigation of the methods and algorithms used to predict protein structure and a thorough knowledge of the function and structure of proteins are critical for the advancement of biology and the life sciences as well as the development of better drugs, higher-yield crops, and even synthetic bio-fuels. To that end, this chapter sheds light on the methods used for protein structure prediction. This chapter covers the applications of modeled protein structures and unravels the relationship between pure sequence information and three-dimensional structure, which continues to be one of the greatest challenges in molecular biology. With this resource, it presents an all-encompassing examination of the problems, methods, tools, servers, databases, and applications of protein structure prediction, giving unique insight into the future applications of the modeled protein structures. In this chapter, current protein structure prediction methods are reviewed for a milieu on structure prediction, the prediction of structural fundamentals, tertiary structure prediction, and functional imminent. The basic ideas and advances of these directions are discussed in detail.


1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Heckel ◽  
K M Hasselbach

Up to now the three-dimensional structure of t-PA or parts of this enzyme is unknown. Using computer graphical methods the spatial structure of the enzymatic part of t-PA is predicted on the hypothesis, the three-dimensional backbone structure of t-PA being similar to that of other serine proteases. The t-PA model was built up in three steps:1) Alignment of the t-PA sequence with other serine proteases. Comparison of enzyme structures available from Brookhaven Protein Data Bank proved elastase as a basis for modeling.2) Exchange of amino acids of elastase differing from the t-PA sequence. The replacement of amino acids was performed such that backbone atoms overlapp completely and side chains superpose as far as possible.3) Modeling of insertions and deletions. To determine the spatial arrangement of insertions and deletions parts of related enzymes such as chymotrypsin or trypsin were used whenever possible. Otherwise additional amino acid sequences were folded to a B-turn at the surface of the proteine, where all insertions or deletions are located. Finally the side chain torsion angles of amino acids were optimised to prevent close contacts of neigh bouring atoms and to improve hydrogen bonds and salt bridges.The resulting model was used to explain binding of arginine 560 of plasminogen to the active site of t-PA. Arginine 560 interacts with Asp 189, Gly 19 3, Ser 19 5 and Ser 214 of t-PA (chymotrypsin numbering). Furthermore interaction of chromo-genic substrate S 2288 with the active site of t-PA was studied. The need for D-configuration of the hydrophobic amino acid at the N-terminus of this tripeptide derivative could be easily explained.


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