<b>OBJECTIVEb>To map the regulatory domain of Escherichia coli T-protein.

<b>METHODSb>Fragmentation cloning was employed in cloning of 11 fragments from T-protein. The regulatory activity of each fragment was determined respectively.

<b>RESULTSb>The regulatory domain of T-protein was located in the C-terminal 270 amino acids, which was the same location as PDH domain.

<b>CONCLUSIONb>T-protein has no independent regulatory domain.

Cloning, Molecular ; Deoxyribonucleases, Type I Site-Specific ; analysis ; chemistry ; genetics ; Escherichia coli Proteins ; analysis ; chemistry ; genetics ; Nucleic Acid Conformation ; Peptide Fragments ; chemistry ; genetics ; Protein Binding ; genetics ; Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional ; genetics

The zinc-finger antiviral protein (ZAP) is a host factor that specifically inhibits the replication of certain viruses, including murine leukemia virus, Sindbis virus and Ebola virus, by targeting the viral mRNAs for degradation. ZAP directly binds to the target viral mRNA and recruits the cellular RNA degradation machinery to degrade the RNA. No significant sequence similarity or obvious common motifs have been found in the so far identified target viral mRNAs. The minimum length of the target sequence is about 500 nt long. Short workable ZAP-binding RNAs should facilitate further studies on the ZAP-RNA interaction and characterization of such RNAs may provide some insights into the underlying mechanism. In this study, we used the SELEX method to isolate ZAP-binding RNA aptamers. After 21 rounds of selection, ZAP-binding aptamers were isolated. Sequence analysis revealed that they are G-rich RNAs with predicted stem-loop structures containing conserved "GGGUGG" and "GAGGG" motifs in the loop region. Insertion of the aptamer sequence into a luciferase reporter failed to render the reporter sensitive to ZAP. However, overexpression of the aptamers modestly but significantly reduced ZAP's antiviral activity. Substitution of the conserved motifs of the aptamers significantly impaired their ZAP-binding ability and ZAP-antagonizing activity, suggesting that the RNA sequence is important for specific interaction between ZAP and the target RNA. The aptamers identified in this report should provide useful tools to further investigate the details of the interaction between ZAP and the target RNAs.
Aptamers, Nucleotide ; chemistry ; genetics ; metabolism ; Base Sequence ; Carrier Proteins ; antagonists & inhibitors ; metabolism ; Genes, Reporter ; HEK293 Cells ; Humans ; Leukemia Virus, Murine ; genetics ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Nucleic Acid Conformation ; Protein Binding ; RNA ; chemistry ; metabolism ; RNA, Viral ; genetics ; Response Elements ; SELEX Aptamer Technique

Collagen is the most abundant protein in human body and a periodic helix, i. e. , triple helix, fibrous protein, which provides the scaffold structures for the cell adhesion and macromolecule aggregation, etc. With the development of gene engineering and biomaterial technologies, and the incessant studies on the technique to obtain the proteins with special functions, the collagen protein has been one of the third generation biomaterials that attract more attention than others. In this paper, we reviewed the recent structure-based design and biosynthesis of collagen.
Animals ; Biotechnology ; methods ; Collagen ; biosynthesis ; chemistry ; genetics ; Humans ; Models, Biological ; Models, Molecular ; Protein Conformation ; Protein Stability ; Protein Structure, Secondary ; Temperature

TRAF4 is a unique member of TRAF family, which is essential for innate immune response, nervous system and other systems. In addition to be an adaptor protein, TRAF4 was identified as a regulator protein in recent studies. We have determined the crystal structure of TRAF domain of TRAF4 (residues 292-466) at 2.60 Å resolution by X-ray crystallography method. The trimericly assembled TRAF4 resembles a mushroom shape, containing a super helical "stalk" which is made of three right-handed intertwined α helixes and a C-terminal "cap", which is divided at residue L302 as a boundary. Similar to other TRAFs, both intermolecular hydrophobic interaction in super helical "stalk" and hydrogen bonds in "cap" regions contribute directly to the formation of TRAF4 trimer. However, differing from other TRAFs, there is an additional flexible loop (residues 421-426), which contains a previously identified phosphorylated site S426 exposing on the surface. This S426 was reported to be phosphorylated by IKKα which is the pre-requisite for TRAF4-NOD2 complex formation and thus to inhibit NOD2-induced NF-κB activation. Therefore, the crystal structure of TRAF4-TRAF is valuable for understanding its molecular basis for its special function and provides structural information for further studies.
Amino Acid Sequence ; Binding Sites ; Crystallography, X-Ray ; Humans ; Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Interactions ; Models, Molecular ; Phosphorylation ; Protein Conformation, alpha-Helical ; Protein Domains ; Protein Structure, Quaternary ; Recombinant Proteins ; chemistry ; Sequence Homology, Amino Acid ; TNF Receptor-Associated Factor 4 ; chemistry

In all six members of TRPV channel subfamily, there is an ankyrin repeat domain (ARD) in their intracellular N-termini. Ankyrin (ANK) repeat, a common motif with typically 33 residues in each repeat, is primarily involved in protein-protein interactions. Despite the sequence similarity among the ARDs of TRPV channels, the structure of TRPV3-ARD, however, remains unknown. Here, we report the crystal structure of TRPV3-ARD solved at 1.95 Å resolution, which reveals six-ankyrin repeats. While overall structure of TRPV3-ARD is similar to ARDs from other members of TRPV subfamily; it, however, features a noticeable finger 3 loop that bends over and is stabilized by a network of hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic packing, instead of being flexible as seen in known TRPV-ARD structures. Electrophysiological recordings demonstrated that mutating key residues R225, R226, Q255, and F249 of finger 3 loop altered the channel activities and pharmacology. Taken all together, our findings show that TRPV3-ARD with characteristic finger 3 loop likely plays an important role in channel function and pharmacology.
Amino Acid Sequence ; Ankyrin Repeat ; Crystallography, X-Ray ; HEK293 Cells ; Humans ; Models, Molecular ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Patch-Clamp Techniques ; Protein Binding ; Protein Conformation ; Protein Structure, Tertiary ; Sequence Homology, Amino Acid ; TRPV Cation Channels ; chemistry ; physiology

Prediction of RNA secondary structures including pseudoknots is a difficult topic in RNA field. Current predicting methods usually have relatively low accuracy and high complexity. Considering that the stacking of adjacent base pairs is a common feature of RNA secondary structure, here we present a method for predicting pseudoknots based on covariance with stacking and minimum free energy. A new score scheme, which combined stacked covariance with free energy, was used to assess the evaluation of base pair in our method. Based on this score scheme, we utilized an iterative procedure to compute the optimized RNA secondary structure with minimum score approximately. In each interaction, helix of high covariance and low free energy was selected until the sequences didn't form helix, so two crossing helixes which were selected from different iterations could form a pseudoknot. We test our method on data sets of ClustalW alignments and structural alignments downloaded from RNA databases. Experimental results show that our method can correctly predict the major portion of pseudoknots. Our method has both higher average sensitivity and specificity than the reference algorithms, and performs much better for structural alignments than for ClustalW alignments. Finally, we discuss the influence on the performance by the factor of covariance weight, and conclude that the best performance is achieved when lambda1 : lambda2 = 5 : 1.
Algorithms ; Base Pairing ; Base Sequence ; Computational Biology ; methods ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Nucleic Acid Conformation ; RNA ; chemistry ; genetics ; Sequence Analysis, RNA

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are one family of short (21-23 nt) regulatory non-coding RNAs processed from long (70-110 nt) miRNA precursors (pre-miRNAs). Identifying true and false precursors plays an important role in computational identification of miRNAs. Some numerical features have been extracted from precursor sequences and their secondary structures to suit some classification methods; however, they may lose some usefully discriminative information hidden in sequences and structures. In this study, pre-miRNA sequences and their secondary structures are directly used to construct an exponential kernel based on weighted Levenshtein distance between two sequences. This string kernel is then combined with support vector machine (SVM) for detecting true and false pre-miRNAs. Based on 331 training samples of true and false human pre-miRNAs, 2 key parameters in SVM are selected by 5-fold cross validation and grid search, and 5 realizations with different 5-fold partitions are executed. Among 16 independent test sets from 3 human, 8 animal, 2 plant, 1 virus, and 2 artificially false human pre-miRNAs, our method statistically outperforms the previous SVM-based technique on 11 sets, including 3 human, 7 animal, and 1 false human pre-miRNAs. In particular, premiRNAs with multiple loops that were usually excluded in the previous work are correctly identified in this study with an accuracy of 92.66%.
Animals ; Artificial Intelligence ; Base Sequence ; Computational Biology ; Databases, Nucleic Acid ; Humans ; MicroRNAs ; chemistry ; genetics ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Nucleic Acid Conformation ; RNA Precursors ; chemistry ; genetics ; Species Specificity

To predict the B cell epitopes for major outer membrane protein (MOMP) of Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), the secondary structure of CT MOMP was predicted by the methods of GOR based on the sequence of amino acids of E serotype CT MOMP. By combining the comprehensive analysis of transmembrane domain, hydrophilicity profile, surface probability, antigenic index and average flexibility, the B cell predominant epitopes of CT MOMP were further predicted. The N-terminal No. 73-81, 217-225, 377-386, 261-270 and 161-175 were the predominant B cell epitopes. Prediction of the B cell epitopes for the CT MOMP by the multi-parameters is helpful for the identification of B cell epitopes.
Amino Acid Sequence ; Antigens, Bacterial ; immunology ; Chlamydia trachomatis ; classification ; immunology ; Epitopes, B-Lymphocyte ; immunology ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Porins ; immunology ; Protein Conformation ; Protein Structure, Secondary ; Serotyping

Degenerate PCR primers were designed by multiple alignment of the protein sequences of known structural genes encoding the catalytic subunits of NiFe-hydrogenases obtained from Swiss-Prot Protein Sequence Database through CLUSTAL-W software and compared for conserved sequence motifs. An amplified PCR product 1 kb in size was obtained from the genomic DNA of Klebsiella pneumoniae using a set of degenerate primers, and then inverse PCR technique was used to obtain the full hydrogenase coding region. A predicted secondary structure and 3D structural model were constructed by homology modeling and docking. On the basis of these results, it was inferred that NiFe-hydrogenase from Klebsiella pneumoniae belongs to the membrane-bound H2 evolving hydrogenase group (Ech hydrogenase group).
Bacterial Proteins ; chemistry ; genetics ; Cloning, Molecular ; Codon ; genetics ; DNA, Bacterial ; chemistry ; genetics ; Databases, Protein ; Hydrogen Bonding ; Hydrogenase ; chemistry ; genetics ; Klebsiella pneumoniae ; enzymology ; genetics ; Models, Molecular ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Protein Conformation ; Protein Structure, Secondary ; Protein Structure, Tertiary ; Sequence Analysis, DNA

To express the extracellular fragement of hepatoma associated antigen HAbl8G(HAb18GEF) in E. coli efficiently in a non-fusing way, the cDNA of HAb18GEF gene was inserted into prokaryotic expression vector pET21a + . The secondary structure and codon adaptation of translational initiation region (TIR, from-30 to + 39) in mRNA of recombinant vector HAb18GEF/ pET21a + was predicted simultaneously by computer-aided design. Stable Stem-Loop structures and many low-usage codons were detected in mRNA-TIR of non-optimized recombinant HAb18GEF/pET21a + vector. The stability of mRNA-TIR in recombinant HAb18GEF/pET21a + vector was reduced with following methods: (1) optimization of secondary structure (2) optimization of codon adaptation. These optimization were realized by non-continual site-directed mutagenesis without changing any amino acid sequence in TIR. After being checked through restriction endonuclease digestion and confirmed through nucleotide sequencing, the pre-optimized and post-optimized recombinant vectors were transformed into competent E. coli JM109-DE3. The resulted recombinant clones were selected randomly and induced by IPTG at 37 degrees C. The induced production of these recombinants was analyzed by SDS-PAGE, indirect ELISA, Western blot, and cell fractionation assay. The amount of HAb18GEF mRNA was also detected by RNA dot blot between pre-optimized recombinant and post-optimized recombinant. The results revealed that recombinant non-fused vectors HAb18GEF/pET21a + were successfully constructed and optimized in the secondary structure and codon adaptation of TIR respectively. The HAb18GEF was expressed efficiently in a non-fusing way in recombinant E. coli by secondary structure optimization or codon adaptation optimization. Whereas, no expression of HAb18GEF was detected in pre-optimized recombinants. The non-fused expression products-HAb18GEF, mainly as inclusion body in E. coli, yielded highly above 29.3%. A trait of expression HAb18GEF was also detected both in intermembrane space and in culture medium due to over-expression and cell leakage. Difference in non-fused expression level of HAb18GEF between secondary structure optimization and codon adaptation optimization was negligible. No difference in amount of transcribed mRNA of HAb18GEF between the pre-optimized and the post-optimized recombinants was detected. To sum up, it's feasible to express hepatoma associated antigen HAb18GEF in a non-fusing way by reducing the stability of TIR in mRNA.
Antigens, Neoplasm ; biosynthesis ; genetics ; Base Sequence ; Basigin ; biosynthesis ; genetics ; Carcinoma, Hepatocellular ; genetics ; immunology ; Escherichia coli ; genetics ; metabolism ; Extracellular Matrix Proteins ; metabolism ; Genetic Vectors ; genetics ; Humans ; Liver Neoplasms ; genetics ; immunology ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Nucleic Acid Conformation ; Protein Biosynthesis ; genetics ; RNA Stability ; RNA, Messenger ; biosynthesis ; genetics