Pervasive degeneracy and epistasis in a protein-protein interface
Abstract
Exploring the variability of individual functional proteins is complicated by the vast number of combinations of possible amino acid sequences. Podgornaia and Laub take on this challenge by analyzing four amino acids critical for the interaction between two signaling proteins in Escherichia coli. They build all the possible 160,000 variants of one of the two proteins and find that over 1650 are functional. Even though there can be very high variability in the composition of the interface between the two proteins, there are nonetheless strong context-dependent constraints for some amino acids, which suggests why many functional variants are not seen in nature.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 06, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1126/science.1257360
Entities
People
- Anna I. Podgornaia
- Laub MT
Organizations
- Human Frontier Science Program
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research