Title

Computational studies on Begomoviral AC2/C2 proteins

Authors

Kanthalu Shagadevan Dinesh Babu¹, Prabu Manoharan^2,3, Gopal Pandi^1,*

Affiliation

¹Department of Plant Biotechnology, School of Biotechnology, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India;

²Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, School of Biotechnology, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India;

³Department of Biotechnology (DDE), Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India;

Email

pgopal.biotech@mkuniversity.org;

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received May 13, 2018; Revised June 9, 2018; Accepted June 10, 2018; Published June 30, 2018

Geminiviridae is a large family of circular, single stranded DNA viruses, which infects and causes devastating diseases on economically important crops. They are subdivided into nine genera. Members of the genus begomovirus encode a pathogenic protein called AC2/C2whichinteracts that inactivates many plant proteins and trans-activates a number of host genes via the C-terminal transactivation domain. Hence, a sequence analysis on C-terminal region of AC2/C2 was completed. Analysis of 124 bipartite and 463 mono partite begomo viral AC2/C2 proteins revealed major differences in protein length, composition and position of acidic, aromatic and hydrophobic residues. Secondary structure analysis of AC2/C2 revealed the possible formation of C-terminal α-helix, which is similar to the acidic activation domain of many transcriptional activator proteins. Previous studies demonstrated that AC2 utilizes conserved late element (CLE) for the transactivation of viral genes and genome-wide mapping of same consensus in A. thaliana yielded 122 promoters with exact CLE consensus sequence. Analysis of protein interaction network for 106 CLE containing genes, 87 AC2 trans activated genes and 10 AC2 interacting proteins revealed a possible regulation of hundreds of host proteins which helps begomoviruses to produce a successful viral infection.

Keywords

Gemini virus, AC2 protein, Transcriptional activator protein, acidic activation domain, protein interaction, CLE elements, Host- gene transactivation.

Citation

Babu et al. Bioinformation 14(6): 294-303 (2018)

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.