title: The P5 protein from bacteriophage phi-6 is a distant homolog of lytic transglycosylases.
abstract: Peptidases are classical objects of enzymology and structural studies. However, a few protein families with experimentally characterized proteolytic activity, but unknown catalytic mechanism and three-dimensional structures, still exist. Using comparative sequence analysis, we deduce spatial structure for one of such families, namely, U40, which contains just one P5 protein from bacteriophage phi-6. We show that this singleton sequence possesses conserved sequence motifs characteristic of lysozymes and is a distant homolog of lytic transglycosylases that cleave bacterial peptidoglycan. The structure of the P5 protein is therefore predicted to adopt the lysozyme-like fold shared by T4, lambda, C-type, G-type lysozymes, and lytic transglycosylases. Since previous biochemical experiments with P5 of phi-6 have indicated that the purified enzyme possesses endopeptidase activity and not glycosidase activity, our results point to the possibility of a newly evolved molecular function and call for further experimental characterization of this unusual P5 protein.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, TX 75390-9038, USA. jpei@chop.swmed.edu
authors.forename: Jimin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pei
authors.forename: Nick V
authors.initials: NV
authors.lastname: Grishin
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D017126:Bacteriophage phi 6 / Q000737:chemistry*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D014764:Viral Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D014764:Viral Proteins