“What we wanted to do is take a step back and instead of looking at individual LCRs, to try to take a look at all of them and to see if we could observe some patterns on a larger scale that might help us figure out what the ones that have assigned functions are doing, and also help us learn a bit about what the ones that don’t have assigned functions are doing,” Jaberi-Lashkari says. Eliezer Calo, an assistant professor of biology at MIT, is the senior author of the paper.īioinformatics is a relatively new scientific subdiscipline that incorporates elements of biology and computer science together for the purpose of developing efficient and robust methods for the analyses and interpretation of large amounts of biological data, such as DNA, RNA, and amino acid sequences or annotations about those sequences. Lee and graduate student Nima Jaberi-Lashkari are the lead authors of the study, which was recently published in the journal eLife. ![]() They showed that these species-specific LCR sequences correspond to species-specific functions, such as forming plant cell walls. “Instead of looking at specific LCRs and their functions, which might seem separate because they’re involved in different processes, our broader approach allows us to see similarities between their properties, suggesting that maybe the functions of LCRs aren’t so disparate after all,” says Byron Lee, an MIT graduate student.ĭifferences between LCRs of different species were also found by the research team. They discovered that while LCRs can vary between proteins and species, they often share a similar role - helping the protein in which they’re found to join a larger-scale assembly such as the nucleolus, an organelle found in nearly all human cells. Using their technique, the scientists analyzed all of the proteins found in eight different species, from bacteria to humans. ![]() Their technique allows them to examine similarities and differences between LCRs from different species, and helps them to resolve the functions of these sequences and the proteins in which they are found. These “low-complexity regions” (LCRs) are also found in the proteins of most other organisms.Īlthough the proteins that contain these sequences have many different functions, MIT biologists have now come up with a way to identify and analyze them as a unified group. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, and edited by MIT News.Ĭomputational analysis reveals that many repetitive sequences are shared across proteins and are similar in species from bacteria to humans.Īpproximately 70 percent of all human proteins include at least one sequence consisting of a single amino acid repeated many times, with a few other amino acids sprinkled in. ![]() MIT researchers used a technique called dot-plot matrix, which is a way to visually represent amino acid sequences, to compare protein sequences known as “low-complexity regions” across many different species.
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