Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹National Center for Biological Sciences (TIFR), UAS-GKVK Campus, Bellary Road, Bangalore 560 065, India; ²Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India; ³R.V. College of Engineering, Mysore Road, Bangalore, India; presently in : Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, USA; ⁴Department of Biotechnology, K. S. Rangasamy College of Technology, KSR. Kalvi Nagar, Tiruchengode - 637215, Tamilnadu, India; ⁵Department of Animal Science, Bharathidasan University Trichirapalli, Tamil Nadu, 620 024, India

Email

mini@ncbs.res.in; *Corresponding author

Phone

+91-080-23666001

Fax

+91-080-23636421

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received August 05, 2011; Accepted August 08, 2011; Published August 20, 2011

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) belong to biologically important and functionally diverse and largest super family of membrane proteins. GPCRs retain a characteristic membrane topology of seven alpha helices with three intracellular, three extracellular loops and flanking N’ and C’ terminal residues. Subtle differences do exist in the helix boundaries (TM-domain), loop lengths, sequence features such as conserved motifs, amino acid patterns and their physiochemical properties amongst these sequences (clusters) at intra-genomic and inter-genomic level. In the current study, we employ prediction of helix boundaries and scores derived from amino acid substitution exchange matrices to identify the conserved amino acid residues (motifs) as consensus in aligned set of homologous GPCR sequences. Co-clustered GPCRs from human and other genomes, organized as 32 clusters, were employed to study the amino acid conservation patterns and species-specific or cluster-specific motifs. Critical analysis on sequence composition and properties provide clues to connect functional relevance within and across genome for vast practical applications such as design of mutations and understanding of disease-causing genetic abnormalities.

Keywords

Transmembrane Helices, Membrane Topology, Amino acid conservation and substitutions, GPCR cluster association.

Citation

Nagarathnam et al. Bioinformation 7(1): 15-20 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.