Comparative genomic prediction of novel transmembrane adaptor proteins and their expression analysis.

Abstract

Transmembrane adaptor proteins play an important role in signal transduction cascades emanating from immune cell receptors leading to cellular effector mechanisms. Despite the lack of enzymatic function, their sequence contains interaction motifs which organize other proteins in time and space and initiates building of the signaling complexes. Functionally the most important and for the longest time known TRAPs are the ones associated with immune receptors. Their deficiency has severe impacts on the signal transduction and knock-out mice show dramatic phenotypes. The deficiency of Lat - the first discovered TRAP, which is not constitutively associated with immune receptors - has comparable effects on signaling in lymphocytes. The difference between the first group of TRAPs and Lat is not only the type of association with receptors, but also the lack of tyrosine - based activation motifs (ITAMs) in Lat, but Lat contains several other binding motifs also based on the phosphorylation of tyrosine. The group of TRAPs similar to Lat up today contains eight members, but all of them, except of Lat, has only very mild or undetectable phenotype in the knock-out mice. In this work I searched the protein databases for proteins with the characteristics of TRAP using the bioinformatic tools. Based on our..