News from the group:
Research Exchange Fellowships - IAESTE (apply)
CAMDA 2023 - ISMB Conference Track, 26-27 July, Lyon, France (read more)
World-leading patient stratification - graph based cancer data integration (read more)
Confirming molecular mechanisms of tendon regeneration - a powerful ovine fetal model (read more)
CAMDA 2022
ISMB Conference Track,
11-12 July, Madison, USA
(read more)
NVIDIA GTC Best Poster Award
for MM Kańduła
at GTC'18
Outstanding Presentation Prize
for MM Kańduła
at CAMDA'17
Outstanding Presentation Prize
for PP Łabaj
at CAMDA'15 (photo)
Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation scholarship
for MM Kańduła
at Boston University
OeAW APART fellowship
for PP Łabaj
(photo)

Sequencing Quality Control (SEQC) project,
MAQC Consortium 2011–2014 (read more)
Host–parasite interactions in biocontrol, WWTF grant 2010–2013 (read more)

Power and limitations of RNA-Seq,
FDA SEQC, Nature Biotechnology (read more)
Characterization and improvement of RNA-Seq precision,
Bioinformatics (read more)
Impact of heavy tails in microarray analysis, Bioinformatics (read more)
Novel conserved repeats in sorting signals,
FEBS Journal (read more)
Sound sensation gene,
Nature communications
(read more)
RNA interference in ageing research,
Gerontology (read more)

Novel conserved repeats in sorting signals

There has been an increasing interest in single amino acid repeats ever since it was shown that these are the cause of a variety of diseases. Subsequently, such repeats have been implicated in a number of roles, including the facilitation of adaptive processes and in protein interaction networks.

In generic surveys, leucine repeats, which can be toxic, surprisingly were among the most frequent. We could show that repeats of leucine – but not of other hydrophobic amino acids – are over-represented in signal peptides that are cleaved off the mature protein. This trend is most pronounced in higher eukaryotes, particularly in mammals. In the human proteome, although less than one-fifth of all proteins have a signal peptide, approximately two-thirds of all leucine repeats are located in these transient regions. Sequence alignment-based relative conservation scores (follow link for full figure and legend) The substantial fraction of proteins affected by the strong enrichment of repeats in these transient segments also highlights the bias that they can introduce for systematic analyses of protein sequences.

Moreover, in contrast to a general lack of conservation of repeats, these leucine repeats were found to be more conserved than the remaining signal peptide regions, indicating that they may have an as yet unknown functional role.

Reference

Łabaj PP, Leparc GG, Bardet AF, Kreil G, Kreil DP (2010) Single amino acid repeats in signal peptides, FEBS Journal 277, 3147. (read more | Supplement | preprint)



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