Aragonite-associated biomineralization proteins are disordered and contain interactive motifs

John Spencer Evans

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Motivation: The formation of aragonite mineral in the mollusk shell or pearl nacre requires the participation of a diverse set of proteins that form the mineralized extracellular matrix. Although self-assembly processes have been identified for several nacre proteins, these proteins do not contain known globular protein-protein binding domains. Thus, we hypothesize that other sequence features are responsible for nacre matrix protein-protein assembly processes and ultimately aragonite biosynthesis.Results: Of 39 mollusk aragonite-associated protein sequences, 100% contain at least one region of intrinsic disorder or unfolding, with the highest percentages found in framework and pearl-associated proteins relative to the intracrystalline proteins. In some instances, these intrinsically disordered regions were identified as bind/fold sequences, and a limited number correlate with known biomineral-relevant sequences. Interestingly, 95% of the aragonite-associated protein sequences were found to contain at least one occurrence of amyloid-like or cross-β strand aggregation-prone supersecondary motifs, and this correlates with known aggregation and aragonite formation functions in three experimentally tested protein sequences. Collectively, our findings indicate that aragonite-associated proteins have evolved signature sequence traits of intrinsic disorder and aggregation-prone regions that are important for their role(s) in matrix assembly and mineralization.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Pages (from-to)3182-3185
    Number of pages4
    JournalBioinformatics
    Volume28
    Issue number24
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Dec 2012

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Statistics and Probability
    • Biochemistry
    • Molecular Biology
    • Computer Science Applications
    • Computational Theory and Mathematics
    • Computational Mathematics

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