On the structure of hisH: protein structure prediction in the context of structural and functional genomics

In vivo evaluation of the interaction between the Escherichia coli IGP synthase subunits using the Bacterial Two-Hybrid system

Histidine biosynthesis is one of the most characterized metabolic routes for its antiquity and its central role in cellular metabolism; indeed, it represents a cross-road between nitrogen metabolism and de novo synthesis of purines. This interconnection is due to the activity of imidazole glycerol phosphate synthase, a heterodimeric enzyme constituted by the products of two his genes, hisH and hisF, encoding a glutamine amidotransferase and a cyclase, respectively. Despite their interaction was suggested by several in vitro experiments, their in vivo complex formation has not been demonstrated. On the contrary, the analysis of the entire Escherichia coli interactome performed using the yeast two hybrid system did not suggest the in vivo interaction of the two IGP synthase subunits. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the interaction of the two proteins using the Bacterial Adenylate Cyclase Two-Hybrid (BACTH) system. Data obtained demonstrated the in vivo interaction occurring between the proteins encoded by the E. coli hisH and hisF genes; this finding might also open the way to pharmaceutical applications through the design of selective drugs toward this enzyme.

Involvement of HisF in the Persistence of Acinetobacter baumannii During a Pneumonia Infection

Acinetobacter baumannii is currently considered one of the most problematic nosocomial microorganisms. In the present work the hisF gene from the ATCC 17978 strain and the AbH12O-A2 clinical isolate of A. baumannii was found over-expressed during the course of murine pneumonia infections. The study demonstrated that the A. baumannii ATCC 17978 mutant strain lacking the hisF gene induces a sub-lethal pneumonia infection in mice, while the complemented mutant strain increased its virulence. This histidine auxotroph mutant showed an increase on IL-6 secretion and leukocytes recruitment during infections. Furthermore, data revealed that the hisF gene, implicated in the innate immunity and inflammation, is involved in virulence during a pneumonia infection, which may partly explain the ability of this strain to persist in the lung. We suggest that HisF, essential for full virulence in this pathogen, should be considered a potential target for developing new antimicrobial therapies against A. baumannii.

Importance 

Nosocomial pathogens such as A. baumannii are able to acquire and develop multi-drug resistance and represent an important clinical and economic problem. There is therefore an urgent need to find new therapeutic targets to fight against A. baumannii. In the present work, the potential of HisF from A. baumannii as a therapeutic target has been addressed since this protein is involved in the innate inmunity and the inflamatory response and seems essential to develop a pneumonia in mice. This work lays the groundwork for designing antimicrobial therapies that block the activity of HisF.

Semantically predicting protein functions based on protein functional connectivity

BACKGROUND

The current availability of public protein-protein interaction (PPI) databases which are usually modelled as PPI networks has led to the rapid development of protein function prediction approaches. The existing network-based prediction approaches mainly focus on the topological similarities between immediately interacting proteins, neglecting the protein functional connectivity which is the functional tightness between proteins. In this paper, we attempt to predict the functions of unannotated proteins based on PPI networks by incorporating the protein functional connectivity, as well as the similarity of protein functions, into the prediction procedure.

RESULTS

An approach named Semantic protein function Prediction based on protein Functional Connectivity (SPFC) is proposed to achieve a higher accuracy in predicting functions of unannotated protein. We define the functional connectivity and function addition for each protein, and incorporate them into the prediction. We evaluated the SPFC on real PPI datasets and the experiment results show that the SPFC method is more effective in function prediction than other network-based approaches.

CONCLUSION

Incorporating the functional connectivity of each protein into the function prediction can significantly improve the accuracy of protein prediction.

Experimental evidence validating the computational inference of functional associations from gene fusion events: a critical survey

More than a decade ago, a number of methods were proposed for the inference of protein interactions, using whole-genome information from gene clusters, gene fusions and phylogenetic profiles. This structural and evolutionary view of entire genomes has provided a valuable approach for the functional characterization of proteins, especially those without sequence similarity to proteins of known function. Furthermore, this view has raised the real possibility to detect functional associations of genes and their corresponding proteins for any entire genome sequence. Yet, despite these exciting developments, there have been relatively few cases of real use of these methods outside the computational biology field, as reflected from citation analysis. These methods have the potential to be used in high-throughput experimental settings in functional genomics and proteomics to validate results with very high accuracy and good coverage. In this critical survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of 30 most prominent examples of single pairwise protein interaction cases in small-scale studies, where protein interactions have either been detected by gene fusion or yielded additional, corroborating evidence from biochemical observations. Our conclusion is that with the derivation of a validated gold-standard corpus and better data integration with big experiments, gene fusion detection can truly become a valuable tool for large-scale experimental biology.

Rational, combinatorial, and genomic approaches for engineering L-tyrosine production in Escherichia coli

Although microbial metabolic engineering has traditionally relied on rational and knowledge-driven techniques, significant improvements in strain performance can be further obtained through the use of combinatorial approaches exploiting phenotypic diversification and screening. Here, we demonstrate the combined use of global transcriptional machinery engineering and a high-throughput L-tyrosine screen towards improving L-tyrosine production in Escherichia coli. This methodology succeeded in generating three strains from two separate mutagenesis libraries (rpoA and rpoD) exhibiting up to a 114% increase in L-tyrosine titer over a rationally engineered parental strain with an already high capacity for production. Subsequent strain characterization through transcriptional analysis and whole genome sequencing allowed complete phenotype reconstruction from well-defined mutations and point to important roles for both the acid stress resistance pathway and the stringent response of E. coli in imparting this phenotype. As such, this study presents one of the first examples in which cell-wide measurements have helped to elucidate the genetic and biochemical underpinnings of an engineered cellular property, leading to the total restoration of metabolite overproduction from specific chromosomal mutations.

Evolutionary profiles from the QR factorization of multiple sequence alignments

We present an algorithm to generate complete evolutionary profiles that represent the topology of the molecular phylogenetic tree of the homologous group. The method, based on the multidimensional QR factorization of numerically encoded multiple sequence alignments, removes redundancy from the alignments and orders the protein sequences by increasing linear dependence, resulting in the identification of a minimal basis set of sequences that spans the evolutionary space of the homologous group of proteins. We observe a general trend that these smaller, more evolutionarily balanced profiles have comparable and, in many cases, better performance in database searches than conventional profiles containing hundreds of sequences, constructed in an iterative and computationally intensive procedure. For more diverse families or superfamilies, with sequence identity <30%, structural alignments, based purely on the geometry of the protein structures, provide better alignments than pure sequence-based methods. Merging the structure and sequence information allows the construction of accurate profiles for distantly related groups. These structure-based profiles outperformed other sequence-based methods for finding distant homologs and were used to identify a putative class II cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase (CysRS) in several archaea that eluded previous annotation studies. Phylogenetic analysis showed the putative class II CysRSs to be a monophyletic group and homology modeling revealed a constellation of active site residues similar to that in the known class I CysRS.

Developing an energy landscape for the novel function of a (beta/alpha)8 barrel: ammonia conduction through HisF

HisH-hisF is a multidomain globular protein complex; hisH is a class I glutamine amidotransferase that hydrolyzes glutamine to form ammonia, and hisF is a (beta/alpha)8 barrel cyclase that completes the ring formation of imidizole glycerol phosphate synthase. Together, hisH and hisF form a glutamine amidotransferase that carries out the fifth step of the histidine biosynthetic pathway. Recently, it has been suggested that the (beta/alpha)8 barrel participates in a novel function: to channel ammonia from the active site of hisH to the active site of hisF. The present study presents a series of molecular dynamic simulations that investigate the channeling function of hisF. This article reconstructs potentials of mean force for the conduction of ammonia through the channel, and the entrance of ammonia through the strictly conserved channel gate, in both a closed and a hypothetical open conformation. The resulting energy landscape within the channel supports the idea that ammonia does indeed pass through the barrel, interacting with conserved hydrophilic residues along the way. The proposed open conformation, which involves an alternate rotamer state of one of the gate residues, presents only an approximately 2.5-kcal energy barrier to ammonia entry. Another alternate open-gate conformation, which may play a role in non-nitrogen-fixing organisms, is deduced through bioinformatics.

Ab initio protein structure prediction

Steady progress has been made in the field of ab initio protein folding. A variety of methods now allow the prediction of low-resolution structures of small proteins or protein fragments up to approximately 100 amino acid residues in length. Such low-resolution structures may be sufficient for the functional annotation of protein sequences on a genome-wide scale. Although no consistently reliable algorithm is currently available, the essential challenges to developing a general theory or approach to protein structure prediction are better understood. The energy landscapes resulting from the structure prediction algorithms are only partially funneled to the native state of the protein. This review focuses on two areas of recent advances in ab initio structure prediction-improvements in the energy functions and strategies to search the caldera region of the energy landscapes.