Uncovering domain motif interactions using high-throughput protein-protein interaction detection methods

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are often mediated by short linear motifs (SLiMs) in one protein and domain in another, known as domain-motif interactions (DMIs). During the past decade, SLiMs have been studied to find their role in cellular functions such as post-translational modifications, regulatory processes, protein scaffolding, cell cycle progression, cell adhesion, cell signalling and substrate selection for proteasomal degradation. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current PPI detection techniques and resources, focusing on their relevance to capturing interactions mediated by SLiMs. We also address the challenges associated with capturing DMIs. Moreover, a case study analysing the BioGrid database as a source of DMI prediction revealed significant known DMI enrichment in different PPI detection methods. Overall, it can be said that current high-throughput PPI detection methods can be a reliable source for predicting DMIs.

Computational Tools and Strategies to Develop Peptide-Based Inhibitors of Protein-Protein Interactions

Protein-protein interactions play crucial and subtle roles in many biological processes and modifications of their fine mechanisms generally result in severe diseases. Peptide derivatives are very promising therapeutic agents for modulating protein-protein associations with sizes and specificities between those of small compounds and antibodies. For the same reasons, rational design of peptide-based inhibitors naturally borrows and combines computational methods from both protein-ligand and protein-protein research fields. In this chapter, we aim to provide an overview of computational tools and approaches used for identifying and optimizing peptides that target protein-protein interfaces with high affinity and specificity. We hope that this review will help to implement appropriate in silico strategies for peptide-based drug design that builds on available information for the systems of interest.

The Applications of Clustering Methods in Predicting Protein Functions

Background:

The understanding of protein function is essential to the study of biological processes. However, the prediction of protein function has been a difficult task for bioinformatics to overcome. This has resulted in many scholars focusing on the development of computational methods to address this problem.

Objective:

In this review, we introduce the recently developed computational methods of protein function prediction and assess the validity of these methods. We then introduce the applications of clustering methods in predicting protein functions.

Discovering interacting domains and motifs in protein-protein interactions

Many important biological processes, such as the signaling pathways, require protein-protein interactions (PPIs) that are designed for fast response to stimuli. These interactions are usually transient, easily formed, and disrupted, yet specific. Many of these transient interactions involve the binding of a protein domain to a short stretch (3-10) of amino acid residues, which can be characterized by a sequence pattern, i.e., a short linear motif (SLiM). We call these interacting domains and motifs domain-SLiM interactions. Existing methods have focused on discovering SLiMs in the interacting proteins' sequence data. With the recent increase in protein structures, we have a new opportunity to detect SLiMs directly from the proteins' 3D structures instead of their linear sequences. In this chapter, we describe a computational method called SLiMDIet to directly detect SLiMs on domain interfaces extracted from 3D structures of PPIs. SLiMDIet comprises two steps: (1) interaction interfaces belonging to the same domain are extracted and grouped together using structural clustering and (2) the extracted interaction interfaces in each cluster are structurally aligned to extract the corresponding SLiM. Using SLiMDIet, de novo SLiMs interacting with protein domains can be computationally detected from structurally clustered domain-SLiM interactions for PFAM domains which have available 3D structures in the PDB database.