Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Key Laboratory of Physiological Ecology & Genetic Improvement of Food Crops in Henan Province, College of Life Science, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou 450002, China; ²College of Life Science, Henan Agricultural University, Rd. Nongye 63, Zhengzhou 450002, China.

Email

wangwei@henau.edu.cn; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received February 21, 2013; Accepted February 23, 2013; Published March 19, 2013

Maize protein EMB564 is a member of group 1 LEA (late embryogenesis abundant) proteins. Currently, the molecular functions of group 1 LEA proteins remain largely unclear. We here report on the functional assignment to EMB564 by computational analysis. EMB564 is predicted as nuclear localization by five different predictors including CELLO, Plant-mPLoc, WoLF PSORT, Predotar and TargetP. EMB564 is found to be remote homologous with DNA/RNA helicases and single-stranded DNA-binding proteins, and their sequences contains similar DNA/RNA binding sites. Furthermore, the three-dimensional (3D) model of EMB564 structurally resembles a variety of nuclear and DNA/RNA-binding proteins, especially those involving in the regulation of cell division, chromosomal replication and DNA unwinding or repairing. Our results reveal that EMB564 protein is most likely to function within the cell nucleus. 

Keywords

Computational analysis, DNA-binding, EMB564 protein, Function assignment, Zea Mays.

Citation

Wu et al.   Bioinformation 9(6): 276-280 (2013)

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.