scholarly journals Conserved phosphorylation hotspots in eukaryotic protein domain families

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta J. Strumillo ◽  
Michaela Oplová ◽  
Cristina Viéitez ◽  
David Ochoa ◽  
Mohammed Shahraz ◽  
...  

AbstractProtein phosphorylation is the best characterized post-translational modification that regulates almost all cellular processes through diverse mechanisms such as changing protein conformations, interactions, and localization. While the inventory for phosphorylation sites across different species has rapidly expanded, their functional role remains poorly investigated. Here, we have combined 537,321 phosphosites from 40 eukaryotic species to identify highly conserved phosphorylation “hotspot” regions within domain families. Mapping these regions onto structural data revealed that they are often found at interfaces, near catalytic residues and tend to harbor functionally important phosphosites. Notably, functional studies of a phospho-deficient mutant in the C-terminal hotspot region within the Ribosomal S11 domain in the yeast ribosomal protein uS11 showed cold-sensitive phenotype and impaired 20S pre-rRNA processing. Altogether, our study identified phosphorylation hotspots for 162 protein domains suggestive of an ancient role for the control of diverse eukaryotic domain families.

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Alves Bezerra Morais ◽  
Carla Santana Francisco ◽  
Heberth de Paula ◽  
Rayssa Ribeiro ◽  
Mariana Alves Eloy ◽  
...  

: Historically, the medicinal chemistry is concerned with the approach of organic chemistry to new drug synthesis. Considering the fruitful collections of new molecular entities, the dedicated efforts for medicinal chemistry are rewarding. Planning and search of new and applicable pharmacologic therapies involve the altruistic nature of the scientists. Since the 19th century, notoriously the application of isolated and characterized plant-derived compounds in modern drug discovery and in various stages of clinical development highlight its viability and significance. Natural products influence a broad range of biological processes, covering transcription, translation, and post-translational modification and being effective modulators of almost all basic cellular processes. The research of new chemical entities through “click chemistry” continuously opens up a map for the remarkable exploration of chemical space in towards leading natural products optimization by structure-activity relationship. Finally, here in this review, we expect to gather a broad knowledge involving triazolic natural products derivatives, synthetic routes, structures, and their biological activities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niaz Mahmood ◽  
Nahid Tamanna

Ankyrin (ANK) repeat containing proteins are evolutionary conserved and have functions in crucial cellular processes like cell cycle regulation and signal transduction. In this study, through an entirely in silico approach using the first release of the moss genome annotation, we found that at least 54 ANK proteins are present in P. patens. Based on their differential domain composition, the identified ANK proteins were classified into nine subfamilies. Comparative analysis of the different subfamilies of ANK proteins revealed that P. patens contains almost all the known subgroups of ANK proteins found in the other angiosperm species except for the ones having the TPR domain. Phylogenetic analysis using full length protein sequences supported the subfamily classification where the members of the same subfamily almost always clustered together. Synonymous divergence (dS) and nonsynonymous divergence (dN) ratios showed positive selection for the ANK genes of P. patens which probably helped them to attain significant functional diversity during the course of evolution. Taken together, the data provided here can provide useful insights for future functional studies of the proteins from this superfamily as well as comparative studies of ANK proteins.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Viéitez ◽  
Bede P. Busby ◽  
David Ochoa ◽  
André Mateus ◽  
Marco Galardini ◽  
...  

AbstractPhosphorylation is a critical post-translational modification involved in the regulation of almost all cellular processes. However, less than 5% of thousands of recently discovered phosphorylation sites have a known function. Here, we devised a chemical genetic approach to study the functional relevance of phosphorylation in S. cerevisiae. We generated 474 phospho-deficient mutants that, along with the gene deletion library, were screened for fitness in 102 conditions. Of these, 42% exhibited growth phenotypes, suggesting these phosphosites are likely functional. We inferred their function based on the similarity of their growth profiles with that of gene deletions, and validated a subset by thermal proteome profiling and lipidomics. While some phosphomutants showed loss-of-function phenotypes, a higher fraction exhibited phenotypes not seen in the corresponding gene deletion suggestive of a gain-of-function effect. For phosphosites conserved in humans, the severity of the yeast phenotypes is indicative of their human functional relevance. This study provides a roadmap for functionally characterizing phosphorylation in a systematic manner.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junfeng Ma ◽  
Yaoxiang Li ◽  
Chunyan Hou ◽  
Ci Wu

ABSTRACTO-linked β-N-acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) is a post-translational modification (i.e., O-GlcNAcylation) on serine/threonine residues of proteins. As a unique intracellular monosaccharide modification, protein O-GlcNAcylation plays important roles in almost all biochemical processes examined. Aberrant O-GlcNAcylation underlies the etiologies of a number of chronic diseases (including cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disease). With the tremendous improvement of techniques, thousands of proteins along with their O-GlcNAc sites have been reported. However, until now there is no database dedicated to accommodate the rapid accumulation of such information. Thus, O-GlcNAcAtlas is created to integrate all experimentally identified O-GlcNAc sites and proteins from 1984 to Dec, 2019. O-GlcNAcAtlas consists of two datasets (Dataset-I and Dataset-II, for unambiguously identified sites and ambiguously identified sites, respectively), representing a total number of 4571 O-GlcNAc modified proteins. For each protein, comprehensive information (including gene name, organism, modification sites, site mapping methods and literature references) is provided. To solve the heterogeneity among the data collected from different sources, the sequence identity of these reported O-GlcNAc peptides are mapped to the UniProtKB protein entries. To our knowledge, O-GlcNAcAtlas is the comprehensive and curated database encapsulating all O-GlcNAc sites and proteins identified in the past 35 years. We expect that O-GlcNAcAtlas will be a useful resource which will facilitate site-specific O-GlcNAc functional studies and computational analyses of protein O-GlcNAcylation. The public version of the web interface to the O-GlcNAcAtlas can be found at https://oglcnac.org.


Antioxidants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1631
Author(s):  
Peng Wang ◽  
Hua Fang ◽  
Rong Gao ◽  
Weibiao Liao

As an endogenous gaseous transmitter, the function of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) has been extensively studied in plants. Once synthesized, H2S may be involved in almost all life processes of plants. Among them, a key route for H2S bioactivity occurs via protein persulfidation, in which process oxidizes cysteine thiol (R-SH) groups into persulfide (R-SSH) groups. This process is thought to underpin a myriad of cellular processes in plants linked to growth, development, stress responses, and phytohormone signaling. Multiple lines of emerging evidence suggest that this redox-based reversible post-translational modification can not only serve as a protective mechanism for H2S in oxidative stress, but also control a variety of biochemical processes through the allosteric effect of proteins. Here, we collate emerging evidence showing that H2S-mediated persulfidation modification involves some important biochemical processes such as growth and development, oxidative stress, phytohormone and autophagy. Additionally, the interaction between persulfidation and S-nitrosylation is also discussed. In this work, we provide beneficial clues for further exploration of the molecular mechanism and function of protein persulfidation in plants in the future.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ochoa ◽  
Andrew F. Jarnuczak ◽  
Maja Gehre ◽  
Margaret Soucheray ◽  
Askar A. Kleefeldt ◽  
...  

AbstractProtein phosphorylation is a key post-translational modification regulating protein function in almost all cellular processes. While tens of thousands of phosphorylation sites have been identified in human cells to date, the extent and functional importance of the phosphoproteome remains largely unknown. Here, we have analyzed 6,801 publicly available phospho-enriched mass spectrometry proteomics experiments, creating a state-of-the-art phosphoproteome containing 119,809 human phosphosites. To prioritize functional sites, 59 features indicative of proteomic, structural, regulatory or evolutionary relevance were integrated into a single functional score using machine learning. We demonstrate how this prioritization identifies regulatory phosphosites across different molecular mechanisms and pinpoint genetic susceptibilities at a genomic scale. Several novel regulatory phosphosites were experimentally validated including a role in neuronal differentiation for phosphosites present in the SWI/SNF SMARCC2 complex member. The scored reference phosphoproteome and its annotations identify the most relevant phosphorylations for a given process or disease addressing a major bottleneck in cell signaling studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie N. Orr ◽  
Robbie Waugh ◽  
Isabelle Colas

Meiosis is a specialized cell division which is essential to sexual reproduction. The success of this highly ordered process involves the timely activation, interaction, movement, and removal of many proteins. Ubiquitination is an extraordinarily diverse post-translational modification with a regulatory role in almost all cellular processes. During meiosis, ubiquitin localizes to chromatin and the expression of genes related to ubiquitination appears to be enhanced. This may be due to extensive protein turnover mediated by proteasomal degradation. However, degradation is not the only substrate fate conferred by ubiquitination which may also mediate, for example, the activation of key transcription factors. In plant meiosis, the specific roles of several components of the ubiquitination cascade—particularly SCF complex proteins, the APC/C, and HEI10—have been partially characterized indicating diverse roles in chromosome segregation, recombination, and synapsis. Nonetheless, these components remain comparatively poorly understood to their counterparts in other processes and in other eukaryotes. In this review, we present an overview of our understanding of the role of ubiquitination in plant meiosis, highlighting recent advances, remaining challenges, and high throughput methods which may be used to overcome them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maximilian Fottner ◽  
Maria Weyh ◽  
Stefan Gaussmann ◽  
Dominic Schwarz ◽  
Michael Sattler ◽  
...  

AbstractThe post-translational modification of proteins with ubiquitin (Ub) and Ub-like modifiers (Ubls) represents one of the most important regulators in eukaryotic biology. Polymeric Ub/Ubl chains of distinct topologies control the activity, stability, interaction and localization of almost all cellular proteins and elicit a variety of biological outputs. Our ability to characterize the roles of distinct Ub/Ubl topologies and to identify enzymes and receptors that create, recognize and remove these modifications is however hampered by the difficulty to prepare them. Here we introduce a modular toolbox (Ubl-tools) that allows the stepwise assembly of Ub/Ubl chains in a flexible and user-defined manner facilitated by orthogonal sortase enzymes. We demonstrate the universality and applicability of Ubl-tools by generating distinctly linked Ub/Ubl hybrid chains, and investigate their role in DNA damage repair. Importantly, Ubl-tools guarantees straightforward access to target proteins, site-specifically modified with distinct homo- and heterotypic (including branched) Ub chains, providing a powerful approach for studying the functional impact of these complex modifications on cellular processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 6054
Author(s):  
Ioanna Kokkinopoulou ◽  
Paraskevi Moutsatsou

Mitochondria are membrane organelles present in almost all eukaryotic cells. In addition to their well-known role in energy production, mitochondria regulate central cellular processes, including calcium homeostasis, Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) generation, cell death, thermogenesis, and biosynthesis of lipids, nucleic acids, and steroid hormones. Glucocorticoids (GCs) regulate the mitochondrially encoded oxidative phosphorylation gene expression and mitochondrial energy metabolism. The identification of Glucocorticoid Response Elements (GREs) in mitochondrial sequences and the detection of Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) in mitochondria of different cell types gave support to hypothesis that mitochondrial GR directly regulates mitochondrial gene expression. Numerous studies have revealed changes in mitochondrial gene expression alongside with GR import/export in mitochondria, confirming the direct effects of GCs on mitochondrial genome. Further evidence has made clear that mitochondrial GR is involved in mitochondrial function and apoptosis-mediated processes, through interacting or altering the distribution of Bcl2 family members. Even though its exact translocation mechanisms remain unknown, data have shown that GR chaperones (Hsp70/90, Bag-1, FKBP51), the anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2, the HDAC6- mediated deacetylation and the outer mitochondrial translocation complexes (Tom complexes) co-ordinate GR mitochondrial trafficking. A role of mitochondrial GR in stress and depression as well as in lung and hepatic inflammation has also been demonstrated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 5056
Author(s):  
Tulio L. Campos ◽  
Pasi K. Korhonen ◽  
Neil D. Young

Experimental studies of Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster have contributed substantially to our understanding of molecular and cellular processes in metazoans at large. Since the publication of their genomes, functional genomic investigations have identified genes that are essential or non-essential for survival in each species. Recently, a range of features linked to gene essentiality have been inferred using a machine learning (ML)-based approach, allowing essentiality predictions within a species. Nevertheless, predictions between species are still elusive. Here, we undertake a comprehensive study using ML to discover and validate features of essential genes common to both C. elegans and D. melanogaster. We demonstrate that the cross-species prediction of gene essentiality is possible using a subset of features linked to nucleotide/protein sequences, protein orthology and subcellular localisation, single-cell RNA-seq, and histone methylation markers. Complementary analyses showed that essential genes are enriched for transcription and translation functions and are preferentially located away from heterochromatin regions of C. elegans and D. melanogaster chromosomes. The present work should enable the cross-prediction of essential genes between model and non-model metazoans.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document