Conservation of coevolving protein interfaces bridges prokaryote-eukaryote homologies in the twilight zone

Protein-protein interactions are fundamental for the proper functioning of the cell. As a result, protein interaction surfaces are subject to strong evolutionary constraints. Recent developments have shown that residue coevolution provides accurate predictions of heterodimeric protein interfaces fro...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rodriguez-Rivas, Juan, Marsili, Simone, Juan, David, Valencia, Alfonso
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII)
Repositorio:Repisalud
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repisalud.isciii.es:20.500.12105/7879
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12105/7879
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Biological Evolution
Catalytic Domain
Computational Biology
Databases, Protein
Eukaryota
Humans
Models, Statistical
Prokaryotic Cells
Protein Binding
Protein Interaction Mapping
Protein Multimerization
Proteins
Reproducibility of Results
Sequence Alignment
Sequence Homology
Evolution, Molecular
Mutation
Descripción
Sumario:Protein-protein interactions are fundamental for the proper functioning of the cell. As a result, protein interaction surfaces are subject to strong evolutionary constraints. Recent developments have shown that residue coevolution provides accurate predictions of heterodimeric protein interfaces from sequence information. So far these approaches have been limited to the analysis of families of prokaryotic complexes for which large multiple sequence alignments of homologous sequences can be compiled. We explore the hypothesis that coevolution points to structurally conserved contacts at protein-protein interfaces, which can be reliably projected to homologous complexes with distantly related sequences. We introduce a domain-centered protocol to study the interplay between residue coevolution and structural conservation of protein-protein interfaces. We show that sequence-based coevolutionary analysis systematically identifies residue contacts at prokaryotic interfaces that are structurally conserved at the interface of their eukaryotic counterparts. In turn, this allows the prediction of conserved contacts at eukaryotic protein-protein interfaces with high confidence using solely mutational patterns extracted from prokaryotic genomes. Even in the context of high divergence in sequence (the twilight zone), where standard homology modeling of protein complexes is unreliable, our approach provides sequence-based accurate information about specific details of protein interactions at the residue level. Selected examples of the application of prokaryotic coevolutionary analysis to the prediction of eukaryotic interfaces further illustrate the potential of this approach.