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Lepidopteran wing scales contain abundant cross-linked film-forming histidine-rich cuticular proteins.

Jianqiu Liu | Zhiwei Chen | Yingdan Xiao | Tsunaki Asano | Shenglong Li | Li Peng | Enxiang Chen | Jiwei Zhang | Wanshun Li | Yan Zhang | Xiaoling Tong | Keiko Kadono-Okuda | Ping Zhao | Ningjia He | Kallare P Arunkumar | Karumathil P Gopinathan | Qingyou Xia | Judith H Willis | Marian R Goldsmith | Kazuei Mita
Communications biology | 2021

Scales are symbolic characteristic of Lepidoptera; however, nothing is known about the contribution of cuticular proteins (CPs) to the complex patterning of lepidopteran scales. This is because scales are resistant to solubilization, thus hindering molecular studies. Here we succeeded in dissolving developing wing scales from Bombyx mori, allowing analysis of their protein composition. We identified a distinctive class of histidine rich (His-rich) CPs (6%-45%) from developing lepidopteran scales by LC-MS/MS. Functional studies using RNAi revealed CPs with different histidine content play distinct and critical roles in constructing the microstructure of the scale surface. Moreover, we successfully synthesized films in vitro by crosslinking a 45% His-rich CP (BmorCPR152) with laccase2 using N-acetyl- dopamine or N-β-alanyl-dopamine as the substrate. This molecular study of scales provides fundamental information about how such a fine microstructure is constructed and insights into the potential application of CPs as new biomaterials.

Pubmed ID: 33888855

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Pfam (tool)

RRID:SCR_004726

A database of protein families, each represented by multiple sequence alignments and hidden Markov models (HMMs). Users can analyze protein sequences for Pfam matches, view Pfam family annotation and alignments, see groups of related families, look at the domain organization of a protein sequence, find the domains on a PDB structure, and query Pfam by keywords. There are two components to Pfam: Pfam-A and Pfam-B. Pfam-A entries are high quality, manually curated families that may automatically generate a supplement using the ADDA database. These automatically generated entries are called Pfam-B. Although of lower quality, Pfam-B families can be useful for identifying functionally conserved regions when no Pfam-A entries are found. Pfam also generates higher-level groupings of related families, known as clans (collections of Pfam-A entries which are related by similarity of sequence, structure or profile-HMM).

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MaxQuant (tool)

RRID:SCR_014485

A quantitative proteomics software package for analyzing large-scale mass-spectrometric data sets. It is a set of algorithms that include peak detection and scoring of peptides, mass calibration, database searches for protein identification, protein quantification, and provides summary statistics.

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SignalP (tool)

RRID:SCR_015644

Web application for prediction of the presence and location of signal peptide cleavage sites in amino acid sequences from different organisms. The method incorporates a prediction of cleavage sites and a signal peptide/non-signal peptide prediction based on a combination of several artificial neural networks.

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