Ancient Phylogenetic Beginnings of Immunoglobulin Hypermutation

Virtual interactomics of proteins from biochemical standpoint

Virtual interactomics represents a rapidly developing scientific area on the boundary line of bioinformatics and interactomics. Protein-related virtual interactomics then comprises instrumental tools for prediction, simulation, and networking of the majority of interactions important for structural and individual reproduction, differentiation, recognition, signaling, regulation, and metabolic pathways of cells and organisms. Here, we describe the main areas of virtual protein interactomics, that is, structurally based comparative analysis and prediction of functionally important interacting sites, mimotope-assisted and combined epitope prediction, molecular (protein) docking studies, and investigation of protein interaction networks. Detailed information about some interesting methodological approaches and online accessible programs or databases is displayed in our tables. Considerable part of the text deals with the searches for common conserved or functionally convergent protein regions and subgraphs of conserved interaction networks, new outstanding trends and clinically interesting results. In agreement with the presented data and relationships, virtual interactomic tools improve our scientific knowledge, help us to formulate working hypotheses, and they frequently also mediate variously important in silico simulations.

Length of the hypermutation motif DGYW/WRCH in the focus of statistical limits. Implications for a double-motif or extended motif recognition models

The motif DGYW/WRCH (Mh) and its frequently discussed simplified derivative GYW/WRC (Mhs) are involved in immunoglobulin (Ig) hypermutation. Both these motifs appear to be markedly shorter than the corresponding conventionally predicted minima of valid sequence lengths (MVSL). The same conclusion concerning both Mh and Mhs can also be obtained in the combined case including a less strict semi-empirically defined w-value and one nucleotide length tolerance related to MVSL. Such disagreement indicates considerably low information content in Mh and Mhs when evaluating these motifs as alphabetical structures (words). This fact raises a question of actually recognized structures (presumably longer than Mh and Mhs). Interestingly, both Mh and Mhs dimers or pairs of closely located Mh or Mhs achieve confirmation of length validity in the case of w=0.05, suggesting thus double-motif recognition as one of statistically consistent explanations. This possibility is also in agreement with the results of our model sequence study of mRNA derived from variable Ig gene sequences (rIgV) with respect to the most frequently occurring structures formed by motif overlaps in all model sequence sets. On the other hand, additional superior occurrence of motif pairs at a structurally important distance of a single DNA thread was found in the conserved domain (cd00099) related sequences of Elasmobranchii origin and less markedly in the corresponding human rIgV, but not in a randomly selected human subset of rIgV. The data are discussed with respect to statistical evaluation and structural properties of hypermutation motifs or the competent enzyme, i.e. activation-induced cytidine deaminase.