Glycosylation site prediction using ensembles of Support Vector Machine classifiers

Article discussing the performance of different computational methods for prediction of glycosylation sites from amino acid sequences

Inhibition of Inositol Phosphorylceramide Synthase by the Cyclic Peptide Aureobasidin A▿

By using a detergent-washed membrane preparation, the interaction of the fungal natural product inhibitor aureobasidin A (AbA) with inositol phosphorylceramide synthase (IPC synthase) was studied by kinetic analysis of wild-type and mutant enzyme-catalyzed reactions. AbA inhibited the wild-type enzyme from both Candida albicans and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in an irreversible, time-dependent manner, with apparent Ki values of 183 and 234 pM, respectively. Three synthetic chemistry-derived AbA derivatives, PHA-533179, PHA-556655, and PHA-556656, had affinities 4 to 5 orders of magnitude lower and were reversible inhibitors that competed with the donor substrate phosphatidylinositol (PI). AbA was a reversible, apparently noncompetitive inhibitor, with a Ki of 1.4 μM, of the IPC synthase from an AbA-resistant S. cerevisiae mutant. The Km values for both substrates (ceramide and PI) were similar when they interacted with the mutant and the wild-type enzymes. By contrast, the Vmax for the mutant enzyme was less than 10% of that for the wild-type enzyme. A comparison of the results obtained with AbA with those obtained with two other natural products inhibitors, rustmicin and khafrefungin, revealed that while rustmicin appeared to be a reversible, noncompetitive inhibitor of the wild-type enzyme, with a Ki of 16.0 nM, khafrefungin had the kinetic properties of a time-dependent inhibitor and an apparent Ki of 0.43 nM. An evaluation of the efficiencies of these compounds as inhibitors of the mutant enzyme revealed for both a drop in the apparent affinity for the enzyme of more than 2 orders of magnitude