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      Mechanisms for stabilisation and the maintenance of solubility in proteins from thermophiles

      research-article
      1 , 1 ,
      BMC Structural Biology
      BioMed Central

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          Abstract

          Background

          The database of protein structures contains representatives from organisms with a range of growth temperatures. Various properties have been studied in a search for the molecular basis of protein adaptation to higher growth temperature. Charged groups have emerged as key distinguishing factors for proteins from thermophiles and mesophiles.

          Results

          A dataset of 291 thermophile-derived protein structures is compared with mesophile proteins. Calculations of electrostatic interactions support the importance of charges, but indicate that increases in charge contribution to folded state stabilisation do not generally correlate with the numbers of charged groups. Relative propensities of charged groups vary, such as the substitution of glutamic for aspartic acid sidechains. Calculations suggest an energetic basis, with less dehydration for longer sidechains. Most other properties studied show weak or insignificant separation of proteins from moderate thermophiles or hyperthermophiles and mesophiles, including an estimate of the difference in sidechain rotameric entropy upon protein folding. An exception is increased burial of alanine and proline residues and decreased burial of phenylalanine, methionine, tyrosine and tryptophan in hyperthermophile proteins compared to those from mesophiles.

          Conclusion

          Since an increase in the number of charged groups for hyperthermophile proteins is separable from charged group contribution to folded state stability, we hypothesise that charged group propensity is important in the context of protein solubility and the prevention of aggregation. Accordingly we find some separation between mesophile and hyperthermophile proteins when looking at the largest surface patch that does not contain a charged sidechain. With regard to our observation that aromatic sidechains are less buried in hyperthermophile proteins, further analysis indicates that the placement of some of these groups may facilitate the reduction of folding fluctuations in proteins of the higher growth temperature organisms.

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          Most cited references95

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          Protein folding and misfolding.

          The manner in which a newly synthesized chain of amino acids transforms itself into a perfectly folded protein depends both on the intrinsic properties of the amino-acid sequence and on multiple contributing influences from the crowded cellular milieu. Folding and unfolding are crucial ways of regulating biological activity and targeting proteins to different cellular locations. Aggregation of misfolded proteins that escape the cellular quality-control mechanisms is a common feature of a wide range of highly debilitating and increasingly prevalent diseases.
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            PISCES: a protein sequence culling server.

            PISCES is a public server for culling sets of protein sequences from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) by sequence identity and structural quality criteria. PISCES can provide lists culled from the entire PDB or from lists of PDB entries or chains provided by the user. The sequence identities are obtained from PSI-BLAST alignments with position-specific substitution matrices derived from the non-redundant protein sequence database. PISCES therefore provides better lists than servers that use BLAST, which is unable to identify many relationships below 40% sequence identity and often overestimates sequence identity by aligning only well-conserved fragments. PDB sequences are updated weekly. PISCES can also cull non-PDB sequences provided by the user as a list of GenBank identifiers, a FASTA format file, or BLAST/PSI-BLAST output.
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              List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature: a folder available on the Internet.

              J Euzéby (1997)
              The List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature includes, alphabetically and chronologically, the official names of bacteria as published or validated in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology. It encompasses 5,569 taxa (as of 31 December 1996) and is available on the Internet (URL: ftp:@ftp.cict.fr/pub/ bacterio/).
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                BMC Struct Biol
                BMC Structural Biology
                BioMed Central (London )
                1472-6807
                2007
                29 March 2007
                : 7
                : 18
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Faculty of Life Sciences, Michael Smith Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PT, UK
                Article
                1472-6807-7-18
                10.1186/1472-6807-7-18
                1851960
                17394655
                d73dce3f-5bd4-46b7-8b06-75906a3b9bdd
                Copyright © 2007 Greaves and Warwicker; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 17 November 2006
                : 29 March 2007
                Categories
                Research Article

                Molecular biology
                Molecular biology

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