Relationship between insertion/deletion (indel) frequency of proteins and essentiality

Background: In a previous study, we demonstrated that some essential proteins from pathogenic organisms contained sizable insertions/deletions (indels) when aligned to human proteins of high sequence similarity. Such indels may provide sufficient spatial differences between the pathogenic protein and human proteins to allow for selective targeting. In one example, an indel difference was targeted via large scale in-silico screening. This resulted in selective antibodies and small compounds which were capable of binding to the deletion-bearing essential pathogen protein without any cross-reactivity to the highly similar human protein. The objective of the current study was to investigate whether indels were found more frequently in essential than non-essential proteins. Results: We have investigated three species, Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, for which high-quality protein essentiality data is available. Using these data, we demonstrated with t-tes...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Simon K. Chan, Michael Hsing, Fereydoun Hormozdiari, Artem Cherkasov
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Human Protein, Indels, Proteins