( With more and more protein sequence dat...)Scientists develop protein-sequence analysis tool

Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have written a computer program "to sort the informational 'wheat' from the 'chaff,'" said Brookhaven biochemist John Shanklin, who leads the research team. The program, which is described in the open access journal BMC Bioinformatics*, makes comparisons of groups of related proteins and flags individual amino acid positions that are likely to control function.

Biochemists are interested in identifying "active sites" -- regions of proteins that determine their functions -- and learning how these sites differ between paralogs, proteins that have different functions that arose from a common ancestor. The new program, called CPDL for "conserved property difference locator," identifies positions where two related groups of proteins differ either in amino acid identity or in a property such as charge or polarity.

"Experience tells us that such positions are likely to be biologically important for defining the specific functions of the two protein classes," Shanklin said.

When the Brookhaven team used the program to scan three test cases, each consisting of two groups of related but functionally different enzymes, the program consistently identified positions near enzyme active sites that had been previously predicted from structural and or biochemical studies to be important for the enzymes' specificity and/or function."This suggests that CPDL will have broad utility for identifying amino acid residues likely to play a role in distinguishing protein classes," Shanklin said.

Scientists have already used such comparative sequence analysis to id
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Source:DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory