title: Towards complete sets of farnesylated and geranylgeranylated proteins.
abstract: Three different prenyltransferases attach isoprenyl anchors to C-terminal motifs in substrate proteins. These lipid anchors serve for membrane attachment or protein-protein interactions in many pathways. Although well-tolerated selective prenyltransferase inhibitors are clinically available, their mode of action remains unclear since the known substrate sets of the various prenyltransferases are incomplete. The Prenylation Prediction Suite (PrePS) has been applied for large-scale predictions of prenylated proteins. To prioritize targets for experimental verification, we rank the predictions by their functional importance estimated by evolutionary conservation of the prenylation motifs within protein families. The ranked lists of predictions are accessible as PRENbase (http://mendel.imp.univie.ac.at/sat/PrePS/PRENbase) and can be queried for verification status, type of modifying enzymes (anchor type), and taxonomic distribution. Our results highlight a large group of plant metal-binding chaperones as well as several newly predicted proteins involved in ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, enriching the known functional repertoire of prenylated proteins. Furthermore, we identify two possibly prenylated proteins in Mimivirus. The section HumanPRENbase provides complete lists of predicted prenylated human proteins-for example, the list of farnesyltransferase targets that cannot become substrates of geranylgeranyltransferase 1 and, therefore, are especially affected by farnesyltransferase inhibitors (FTIs) used in cancer and anti-parasite therapy. We report direct experimental evidence verifying the prediction of the human proteins Prickle1, Prickle2, the BRO1 domain-containing FLJ32421 (termed BROFTI), and Rab28 (short isoform) as exclusive farnesyltransferase targets. We introduce PRENbase, a database of large-scale predictions of protein prenylation substrates ranked by evolutionary conservation of the motif. Experimental evidence is presented for the selective farnesylation of targets with an evolutionary conserved modification site.
authors.affiliation: Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria. smaurers@vub.ac.be
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Maurer-Stroh
authors.forename: Manfred
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Koranda
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Benetka
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.forename: Fernanda L
authors.initials: FL
authors.lastname: Sirota
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Eisenhaber
mesh_terms: D017124:Conserved Sequence; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008563:Membrane Lipids / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D008565:Membrane Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping; D017368:Protein Prenylation; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
chemical_list: D008563:Membrane Lipids; D008565:Membrane Proteins