The crystal structure of a bacterial Sufu-like protein defines a novel group of bacterial proteins that are similar to the N-terminal domain of human Sufu.
Sufu (Suppressor of Fused), a two-domain protein, plays a critical role in regulating Hedgehog signaling and is conserved from flies to humans. A few bacterial Sufu-like proteins have previously been identified based on sequence similarity to the N-terminal domain of eukaryotic Sufu proteins, but none have been structurally or biochemically characterized and their function in bacteria is unknown. We have determined the crystal structure of a more distantly related Sufu-like homolog, NGO1391 from Neisseria gonorrhoeae, at 1.4 Å resolution, which provides the first biophysical characterization of a bacterial Sufu-like protein. The structure revealed a striking similarity to the N-terminal domain of human Sufu (r.m.s.d. of 2.6 Å over 93% of the NGO1391 protein), despite an extremely low sequence identity of ∼15%. Subsequent sequence analysis revealed that NGO1391 defines a new subset of smaller, Sufu-like proteins that are present in ∼200 bacterial species and has resulted in expansion of the SUFU (PF05076) family in Pfam.
Das
Debanu
D
Joint Center for Structural Genomics. http://www.jcsg.org
Finn
Robert D
RD
Abdubek
Polat
P
Astakhova
Tamara
T
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Herbert L
HL
Bakolitsa
Constantina
C
Cai
Xiaohui
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Carlton
Dennis
D
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Connie
C
Chiu
Hsiu-Ju
HJ
Chiu
Michelle
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Clayton
Thomas
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Deller
Marc C
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Kyle
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Heath E
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Mark W
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Piotr
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Krishna
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Kumar
Abhinav
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Winnie W
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David
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Mitchell D
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Andrew T
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Edward
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Amanda
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Okach
Linda
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Puckett
Christina
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Ron
R
Tien
Henry J
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Trame
Christine B
CB
van den Bedem
Henry
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Weekes
Dana
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Wooten
Tiffany
T
Xu
Qingping
Q
Yeh
Andrew
A
Zhou
Jiadong
J
Hodgson
Keith O
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Wooley
John
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Elsliger
Marc-André
MA
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Ashley M
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Godzik
Adam
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D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001426:Bacterial Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D003461:Crystallography; D006801:Humans; D008958:Models, Molecular; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009344:Neisseria gonorrhoeae / Q000737:chemistry*; D017434:Protein Structure, Tertiary; D012097:Repressor Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D055672:Static Electricity; D040681:Structural Homology, Protein
D001426:Bacterial Proteins; D012097:Repressor Proteins; C490764:SUFU protein, human