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The high frequency of internal structural symmetry in common protein folds is presumed to reflect their evolutionary origins from the repetition and fusion of ancient peptide modules, but little is known about the primary sequence and physical determinants of this process. Unexpectedly, a sequence and structural analysis of symmetric subdomain modules within an abundant and ancient globular fold, the β-trefoil, reveals that modular evolution is not simply a relic of the ancient past, but is an ongoing and recurring mechanism for regenerating symmetry, having occurred independently in numerous existing β-trefoil proteins. We performed a computational reconstruction of a β-trefoil subdomain module and repeated it to form a newly three-fold symmetric globular protein, ThreeFoil. In addition to its near perfect structural identity between symmetric modules, ThreeFoil is highly soluble, performs multivalent carbohydrate binding, and has remarkably high thermal stability. These findings have far-reaching implications for understanding the evolution and design of proteins via subdomain modules.
Pubmed ID: 22178248
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Software platform for complex network analysis and visualization. Used for visualization of molecular interaction networks and biological pathways and integrating these networks with annotations, gene expression profiles and other state data.
View all literature mentionsTool for searching sequence databases for homologs of protein sequences, and for making protein sequence alignments. It implements methods using probabilistic models called profile hidden Markov models (profile HMMs). Compared to BLAST, FASTA, and other sequence alignment and database search tools based on older scoring methodology, HMMER aims to be significantly more accurate and more able to detect remote homologs because of the strength of its underlying mathematical models. In the past, this strength came at significant computational expense, but in the new HMMER3 project, HMMER is now essentially as fast as BLAST.
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