Saturday, November 29, 2008

Protein of the Day #14: XP_001352106

The genome of the malaria-causing Plasmodium falciparum is bizarre in a number of ways - the most striking feature being the extremely high (over 80%) A+T content. Looking on the protein level, there seem to be many proteins with long asparagine inserts. These asparagine inserts must serve some sort of purpose but it is unclear what it is. They do tend to confuse sequence-alignment and similarity searches, which is one reason so many of the proteins remain uncharacterized.
An extreme case of this is XP_001352106, which has a run of 83 asparagines in a row. It does have some similarity to a subunit of cyclin kinase but not enough to be very confident about its identity.

No comments: