title: Patterns of amino acids near signal-sequence cleavage sites.
abstract: According to the signal hypothesis, a signal sequence, once having initiated export of a growing protein chain across the rough endoplasmic reticulum, is cleaved from the mature protein at a specific site. It has long been known that some part of the cleavage specificity resides in the last residue of the signal sequence, which invariably is one with a small, uncharged side-chain, but no further specific patterns of amino acids near the point of cleavage have been discovered so far. In this paper, some such patterns, based on a sample of 78 eukaryotic signal sequences, are presented and discussed, and a first attempt at formulating rules for the prediction of cleavage sites is made.
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001665:Binding Sites; D005057:Eukaryotic Cells / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D010443:Peptide Chain Termination, Translational