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The Centrosome is the complex molecular assembly that regulates cell cycle transitions, responses to stress, cell division and differentiation in metazoans. In a previous work [1], it has been showed that centrosomal proteins are predicted to be enriched in in phosphorylated sites, in coiled-coil regions, and in intrinsically disordered regions, which grew in evolution through large insertions and entirely new proteins.
We adopt here an evolutionary perspective, comparing structural and functional features of centrosomal proteins in 35 different model species of a wide phylogenetic range, including animal genomes as well as unicellular eukaryotes, fungi and plants genomes. As previously shown for a smaller set of organisms [1], we verified that the gain of disordered and coiled-coil regions in centrosomal proteins is correlated with the increase in cell-types number in animal evolution, establishing a connection between organism and molecular complexity. Parasitic eukaryotes show large fraction of disordered residues both in the control and in the centrosome despite they are unicellular. We hypothesize that in this case the rise of disorder is due to the low efficiency of natural selection in species with reduced effective populations. Moreover, as disordered regions are expected to confer structural plasticity to the Centrosome playing an important role in its mechanical properties and its regulation in space and time, we assessed the structural variability of centrosomal proteins by applying Homology Modelling techniques and comparing structural models obtained using different templates deposited in the PDB database. We present here a comparison of centrosomal and control proteins under this point of view. 1.- Nido G.S. et al. Molecular. BioSystems 2012, 8:353–367. |
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