scholarly journals The spatial network of skeletal proteins in a stony coral

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (175) ◽  
pp. 20200859
Author(s):  
Manjula P. Mummadisetti ◽  
Jeana L. Drake ◽  
Paul G. Falkowski

Coral skeletons are materials composed of inorganic aragonitic fibres and organic molecules including proteins, sugars and lipids that are highly organized to form a solid biomaterial upon which the animals live. The skeleton contains tens of proteins, all of which are encoded in the animal genome and secreted during the biomineralization process. While recent advances are revealing the functions and evolutionary history of some of these proteins, how they are spatially arranged in the skeleton is unknown. Using a combination of chemical cross-linking and high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry, we identify, for the first time, the spatial interactions of the proteins embedded within the skeleton of the stony coral Stylophora pistillata . Our subsequent network analysis revealed that several coral acid-rich proteins are invariably associated with carbonic anhydrase(s), alpha-collagen, cadherins and other calcium-binding proteins. These spatial arrangements clearly show that protein–protein interactions in coral skeletons are highly coordinated and are key to understanding the formation and persistence of coral skeletons through time.

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 767-781
Author(s):  
Vanessa Pinatto Gaspar ◽  
Anelise Cardoso Ramos ◽  
Philippe Cloutier ◽  
José Renato Pattaro Junior ◽  
Francisco Ferreira Duarte Junior ◽  
...  

KIN (Kin17) protein is overexpressed in a number of cancerous cell lines, and is therefore considered a possible cancer biomarker. It is a well-conserved protein across eukaryotes and is ubiquitously expressed in all cell types studied, suggesting an important role in the maintenance of basic cellular function which is yet to be well determined. Early studies on KIN suggested that this nuclear protein plays a role in cellular mechanisms such as DNA replication and/or repair; however, its association with chromatin depends on its methylation state. In order to provide a better understanding of the cellular role of this protein, we investigated its interactome by proximity-dependent biotin identification coupled to mass spectrometry (BioID-MS), used for identification of protein–protein interactions. Our analyses detected interaction with a novel set of proteins and reinforced previous observations linking KIN to factors involved in RNA processing, notably pre-mRNA splicing and ribosome biogenesis. However, little evidence supports that this protein is directly coupled to DNA replication and/or repair processes, as previously suggested. Furthermore, a novel interaction was observed with PRMT7 (protein arginine methyltransferase 7) and we demonstrated that KIN is modified by this enzyme. This interactome analysis indicates that KIN is associated with several cell metabolism functions, and shows for the first time an association with ribosome biogenesis, suggesting that KIN is likely a moonlight protein.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Payne ◽  
Olga Tsaponina ◽  
Gillian Caalim ◽  
Hayley Greenfield ◽  
Leanne Milton-Harris ◽  
...  

Wnt signalling is an evolutionary conserved signal transduction pathway heavily implicated in normal development and disease. The central mediator of this pathway, β-catenin, is frequently overexpressed, mislocalised and overactive in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) where it mediates the establishment, maintenance and drug resistance of leukaemia stem cells. Critical to the stability, localisation and activity of β-catenin are the protein-protein interactions it forms, yet these are poorly defined in AML. We recently performed the first β-catenin interactome study in blood cells of any kind and identified a plethora of novel interacting partners. This study shows for the first time that β-catenin interacts with Wilms tumour protein (WT1), a protein frequently overexpressed and mutated in AML, in both myeloid cell lines and also primary AML samples. We demonstrate crosstalk between the signalling activity of these two proteins in myeloid cells, and show that modulation of either protein can affect expression of the other. Finally, we demonstrate that WT1 mutations frequently observed in AML can increase stabilise β-catenin and augment Wnt signalling output. This study has uncovered new context-dependent molecular interactions for β-catenin which could inform future therapeutic strategies to target this dysregulated molecule in AML.


Author(s):  
Erinna F. Lee ◽  
W. Douglas Fairlie

The discovery of a new class of small molecule compounds that target the BCL-2 family of anti-apoptotic proteins is one of the great success stories of basic science leading to translational outcomes in the last 30 years. The eponymous BCL-2 protein was identified over 30 years ago due to its association with cancer. However, it was the unveiling of the biochemistry and structural biology behind it and its close relatives’ mechanism(s)-of-action that provided the inspiration for what are now known as ‘BH3-mimetics’, the first clinically approved drugs designed to specifically inhibit protein–protein interactions. Herein, we chart the history of how these drugs were discovered, their evolution and application in cancer treatment.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitri R. Davydov ◽  
Bikash Dangi ◽  
Guihua Yue ◽  
Bhagwat Prasad ◽  
Viktor G. Zgoda

This study aimed on exploration of the system-wide effects of the alcohol-induced increase in the content of cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) in the human liver on drug metabolism. Using membrane incorporation of purified CYP2E1 modified with photoreactive crosslinkers benzophenone-4-maleimide (BPM) and 4-(N-succinimidylcarboxy)benzophenone (BPS), we explored the array of its protein-protein interactions (proteome) in human liver microsomes (HLM) with chemical cross-linking mass spectrometry (CXMS). Exposure of bait-incorporated HLM samples to light was followed by isolation of the His-tagged bait protein and its cross-linked aggregates on Ni-NTA agarose. Analyzing the individual bands of SDS-PAGE slabs of thereby isolated protein with the toolset of untargeted proteomics, we detected the cross-linked dimeric and trimeric complexes of CYP2E1 with other drug-metabolizing enzymes. Among the most extensively cross-linked partners of CYP2E1 are cytochromes P450 2A6, 3A4, 2C9, and 4A11. We also detected the conjugates of CYP2E1 with UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs) 1A6, 1A9, 2B4, 2B15, and 2B17. These results demonstrate the exploratory power of the proposed CXMS strategy and corroborate the concept of tight functional integration in the human drug-metabolizing ensemble through protein-protein interactions of the constituting enzymes. Of particular interest is the observation of efficient cross-linking of CYP2E1 with CYP4A11. This enzyme plays a central role in the synthesis of vasoactive eicosanoids and its interactions with alcohol-inducible CYP2E1 may shed light on the mechanisms of alcohol-induced hypertension.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haizhen Zhang ◽  
Xiaoting Tang ◽  
Gerhard R. Munske ◽  
Nikola Tolic ◽  
Gordon A. Anderson ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anderson F. Brito ◽  
John W. Pinney

ABSTRACTThe evolution of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is directly influenced by the evolutionary histories of the genes and the species encoding the interacting proteins. When it comes to PPIs of host-pathogen systems, the complexity of their evolution is much higher, as two independent, but biologically associated entities, are involved. In this work, an integrative approach combining phylogenetics, tree reconciliations, ancestral sequence reconstructions, and homology modelling is proposed for studying the evolution of host-pathogen PPIs. As a case study, we analysed the evolution of interactions between herpesviral glycoproteins gD/gG and the cell membrane proteins nectins. By modelling the structures of more than 12,000 ancestral states of these virus-host complexes it was found that in early times of their evolution, these proteins were unable to interact, most probably due to electrostatic incompatibilities between their interfaces. After the event of gene duplication that gave rise to a paralog of gD (known as gG), both protein lineages evolved following distinct functional constraints, with most gD reaching high binding affinities towards nectins, while gG lost such ability, most probably due to a process of neofunctionalization. Based on their favourable interaction energies (negative ΔG), it is possible to hypothesize that apart from nectins 1 and 2, some alphaherpesviruses might also use nectins 3 and 4 as cell receptors. These findings show that the proposed integrative method is suitable for modelling the evolution of host-pathogen protein interactions, and useful for raising new hypotheses that broaden our understanding about the evolutionary history of PPIs, and their molecular functioning.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhilesh Kumar Bajpai ◽  
Sravanthi Davuluri ◽  
Kriti Tiwary ◽  
Sithalechumi Narayanan ◽  
Sailaja Oguru ◽  
...  

AbstractProtein-protein interactions (PPIs) are critical, and so are the databases and tools (resources) concerning PPIs. But in absence of systematic comparisons, biologists/bioinformaticians may be forced to make a subjective selection among such protein interaction databases and tools. In fact, a comprehensive list of such bioinformatics resources has not been reported so far. For the first time, we compiled 375 PPI resources, short-listed and performed preliminary comparison of 125 important ones (both lists available publicly at startbioinfo.com), and then systematically compared human PPIs from 16 carefully-selected databases. General features have been first compared in detail. The coverage of ‘experimentally verified’ vs. all PPIs, as well as those significant in case of disease-associated and other types of genes among the chosen databases has been compared quantitatively. This has been done in two ways: outputs manually obtained using web-interfaces, and all interactions downloaded from the databases. For the first approach, PPIs obtained in response to gene queries using the web interfaces were compared. As a query set, 108 genes associated with different tissues (specific to kidney, testis, and uterus, and ubiquitous) or diseases (breast cancer, lung cancer, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and cardiomyopathy) were chosen. PPI-coverage for well-studied genes was also compared with that of less-studied ones. For the second approach, the back-end-data from the databases was downloaded and compared. Based on the results, we recommend the use of STRING and UniHI for retrieving the majority of ‘experimentally verified’ protein interactions, and hPRINT and STRING for obtaining maximum number of ‘total’ (experimentally verified as well as predicted) PPIs. The analysis of experimentally verified PPIs found exclusively in each database revealed that STRING contributed about 71% of exclusive hits. Overall, hPRINT, STRING and IID together retrieved ~94% of ‘total’ protein interactions available in the databases. The coverage of certain databases was skewed for some gene-types. The results also indicate that the database usage frequency may not correlate with their advantages, thereby justifying the need for more frequent studies of this nature.


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