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Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India
Reprint requests to: Dr. Narayanaswamy Srinivasan, Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India; e-mail: ns{at}mbu.iisc.ernet.in; fax: 91-80-360 0535.
(RECEIVED August 21, 2001; FINAL REVISION March 4, 2002; ACCEPTED March 5, 2002)
Article and publication are at http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/doi/10.1110/ps.3560102.
| Abstract |
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Keywords: Lipopolysaccharide; outer-cell membrane; phosphorylation; profile matching; protein kinases; sequence comparison
| Introduction |
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Lack of phosphorylation in the core has been shown to result in strains that are hypersensitive to detergents and hydrophobic antibiotics, and also being less virulent (Yethon and Whitfield 2001). Two key enzymes involved in the core phosphorylation, namely WaaP gene product (heptose kinase) and the Kdo (3-Deoxy-D-manno-octulosonic acid) kinase, have been well characterized (White et al. 1999; Yethon and Whitfield 2001). These two LPS kinases differ in their substrate specificity, despite their involvement in the same lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis pathway. As can be seen later in this paper, these two classes of LPS phosphorylating enzymes are related to each other and occur only in Gram-negative bacteria. Occurrence of Kdo kinases has been restricted to Gram-negative pathogens. Earlier studies have shown that the Kdo kinase is responsible for the virulence in Haemophilus influenzae (White et al. 1999). Here, we discuss the results of our analysis indicating significant similarity between amino-acid sequences of these LPS phosphorylating enzymes and eukaryotic protein kinases.
A class of kinase-like sequences, right open reading frame (RIO1), previously has been shown to be coded in the genomes of archaea and eukaryotes (Plowman et al. 1999). Here, we report the occurrence of RIO1 in eubacteria as well, in addition to its occurrence in archaea and eukaryotes, suggesting RIO1 as an evolutionary link between eukaryotic protein kinase-like sequences in prokaryotes and eukaryotic protein kinases. Further, we suggest that RIO1 sequences are intermediately related to LPS phosphorylating enzymes and eukaryotic protein kinases.
Protein kinases encoded in the eukaryotic genomes form one of the largest families of proteins (Hanks and Hunter 1995). The catalytic domain of these kinases share a common three-dimensional (3-D) fold irrespective of their association with diverse domains and subunits required for their regulation (Johnson et al. 1996). The key sequence motifs associated with functional properties and conserved among most protein kinases (Hanks et al. 1988) include the Gly-rich loop (sub-domain I), which occurs close to ATP; the invariant lysine (sub-domain II), which is hydrogen bonded to ATP; and a glutamate (sub-domain III), which anchors the phosphates of the ATP through the invariant lysine. Further functional residues include the catalytic aspartate and invariant asparagine (both in sub-domain VIb) and another aspartate (sub-domain VII), which are required for the chelation of the Mg2+ ions. An invariant aspartate (sub-domain IX) helps in the stabilization of the catalytic loop by interacting with the arginine in the catalytic loop. An arginine preceding the catalytic Asp interacts with the phosphorylated Ser/Thr/Tyr residue to enable correct disposition of the various catalytic residues in those kinases that are regulated by phosphorylation in their activation segment (Johnson et al. 1996). The occurrences of the eukaryotic protein kinase-like sequences in the prokaryotes are becoming increasingly evident with the completion of genome sequencing of many archeaebacterial and eubacterial species (Leonard et al. 1998; Kennelly 2002). However, the most well-studied protein kinases of the prokaryotes belong to the histidine kinase family, which does not share similarity in terms of structure, sequence, and modes of regulation (Dutta et al. 1999) with Ser/Thr/Tyr kinases.
A relationship has been established in the current study between LPS phosphorylating enzymes in Gram-negative bacteria and eukaryotic protein kinases using a match of sequences with profiles of protein families. The compatibility of the sequences of these bacterial proteins to the eukaryotic kinase fold, as deduced from different inverse folding procedures, also is shown to be excellent. These sequences also show a high degree of conservation of functionally critical residues. This suggests that the eukaryotic protein kinases are related to lipopolysaccharide kinases in addition to the lipid kinases (Walker et al. 1999) and aminoglycoside kinases (Hon et al. 1997).
| Results and Discussion |
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A search for the WaaP homologs in the NRDB identified various isoforms of WaaP gene products in E. coli and variants in P. aeruginosa and S. typhimurium. All the WaaP gene products contained kinase-like domain only. The subsequent cycles of PSI-BLAST also picked up KdoK variants followed by eukaryotic protein kinases in support of the relationship between the LPS kinases and the eukaryotic protein kinases.
A search for the eukaryotic protein kinase-like sequences in the database containing the 41 bacterial genomes detected the RIO1 gene products followed by the Kdo kinases in the subsequent cycles. This suggests that the eukaryotic protein kinases are more closely related to the Kdo kinase than to the WaaP gene product. The sequence identity between WaaP and Kdo kinases is low (<14%), while the sequence identities among WaaP proteins and among Kdo kinases are high (>53% and >33%, respectively), suggesting that WaaP and Kdo kinases form different families of LPS kinases.
The biological function of RIO1 is unclear, and it was previously identified only in archaea and in the genomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans (Angenmayr and Bandlow 1997; Leonard et al. 1998; Plowman et al. 1999). In this study, RIO1 homologs have been further identified in two species of eubacteria, P. aeruginosa and Deinococcus radians (E<10-12). This suggests the RIO1 sequences of bacteria could possibly be an intermediate link in the evolution of the eukaryotic protein kinase-like sequences in bacteria and protein kinases in eukaryotes. The results of the PSI-BLAST search with human ERK and RIO1 sequences as queries also suggests that RIO1 sequences are intermediately linked to the KdoK and the eukaryotic protein kinases.
To further ensure that the Kdo kinases are related to the eukaryotic protein kinase family, a profile-based search method IMPALA (Schaffer et al. 1999) was employed. The protein sequence of each variant of KdoK was searched in a profile database comprising 2764 profiles corresponding to the 2697 families of proteins in Pfam (Bateman et al. 2000) and 67 subfamily profiles of the eukaryotic protein kinases. The search picked up about 50 hits below the E-value of 5 x 10-4 and all the hits corresponded to the profiles of various subfamilies of eukaryotic protein kinases. The top-most hits corresponded to extracellularly regulated kinase (ERK) variants from yeast, worm, and human with the E-values of the order of 5 x 10-6. The above results therefore confirm that the KdoK is related to the eukaryotic protein kinase family. Results of the IMPALA search with WaaP gene products are similar to those obtained for Kdo kinases.
Fold recognition of the Kdo kinase sequence has been performed using GENTHREADER (Jones 1999) and 3D-PSSM (Kelley et al. 2000). These procedures work on different principles. GENTHREADER identified 10 hits of known 3-D structure, all of which correspond to the eukaryotic protein kinases, which share the common fold, although the details of the structures vary to some extent. The probability of the hits being the correct fold as suggested by GENTHREADER is one for all of the 10 hits. This corresponds to a GENTHREADER confidence level "Certain; >99%." Interestingly, the sequence identity between Kdo kinase and protein kinases of known structure is very low, ranging between 9% and 15%. The only lipid kinase (PI3 kinase
) structure (Walker et al. 1999) available is not picked up as one of the hits and its fold involves several long insertions compared to Ser/Thr and Tyr kinases. It would have been interesting to explore if the Kdo kinase sequence fits better with the structure of antibiotics phosphorylating enzyme (APH) from Enterococcus (Hon et al. 1997), as the fold of APH is the same as that of Ser/Thr protein kinases. However, the structure of APH is not yet available in the protein data bank, hence this analysis could not be made by us. Result of fold recognition using 3D-PSSM is very similar to that of GENTHREADER. With a KdoK as the query, all of the 20 hits from 3D-PSSM corresponded to Ser/Thr or Tyr kinases with an E-value of the order of 8 x 10-2, which suggests highly reliable hits according to 3D-PSSM.
A multiple sequence alignment of Kdo kinases, WaaP variants, and RIO1 sequences has been generated (Fig. 1
) to analyze the extent of conservation of the functionally critical residues with respect to eukaryotic cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase (cAPK) (Zheng et al. 1993). The catalytic aspartate (D166) conserved in all known eukaryotic protein kinases; a critical lysine (K72) involved in ATP anchoring; an aspargine and aspartate (N171 and D184) involved in chelation of Mg2+; and aspartates (D208, D220) involved in the stabilization of the catalytic loop are all highly conserved in all the bacterial proteins under current investigation. Various buried polar and nonpolar residues (Fig. 1
) occurring in
-helices and ß-strands of cAPK are well conserved in these sequences. The arginine preceding D166 is identified only in the WaaP variants, an indicator of phosphorylation in the activation segment, as seen in the eukaryotic protein kinases (Johnson et al. 1996). Indeed, very recently it has been shown that a site-directed mutant of E. coli WaaP wherein the critical aspartate is replaced by alanine showed almost no phosphorylation on LPS (Yethon and Whitfield 2001). The glycine-rich region is known to occur close to the ATP binding site of eukaryotic protein kinases. While three glycines are present in the "equivalent" region in the bacterial proteins, the sequence pattern deviates from that of eukaryotic protein kinases. However, the only eukaryotic protein kinase-like bacterial kinase of known structure (Hon et al. 1997) that is known to phosphorylate a carbohydrate (aminoglycoside [APH]) lacks a glycine-rich region, although the crystal structure shows ATP binding and remarkable similarity of the overall fold to cAPK (Hon et al. 1997). Based on the conservation of various residues critical for the function in LPS kinases, it is proposed that the mechanism of action LPS kinases, in employing ATP as the phosphate donor and in catalyzing phosphorylation, is similar to that of eukaryotic protein kinases although the substrate specificity of LPS kinases and eukaryotic proteins are very different.
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| Conclusions |
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| Materials and methods |
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Profile matching
Iterative searches have been made using PSI-BLAST (Altschul et al. 1997) in a linux platform using a stand-alone version, on the bacterial genomes and the NRDB with an E-value cut-off of 0.0005. Every PSI-BLAST output has been examined manually to ensure that there is no obvious "drift" as the cycles of the search progressed, which could lead to false positives. A series of searches has been made, using IMPALA (Schaffer et al, 1999), with each one of the Kdo kinase sequences and WaaP gene products as query in a database of 2764 profiles (position-specific score matrices [PSSMs]) corresponding to 2697 protein families in Pfam database (Bateman et al. 2000) and 67 profiles corresponding to various subfamilies of protein kinases. The PSSMs of families in Pfam have been constructed, using the "seed alignments" given in Pfam, to explore using the powers of IMPALA, which uses profile matching in addition to using Hidden Markov Model-based searches in Pfam. The subfamily profiles of eukaryotic protein kinases have been constructed by using the sequences and alignment corresponding to the various subfamilies of eukaryotic protein kinases available at the Protein Kinase Resource (http://www.sdsc.edu/Kinases) (Smith et al. 1997). The multiple sequence alignment shown in the Figure 1
initially was generated by MALIGN (Johnson et al. 1993).
Fold recognition
Two methods, GENTHREADER (Jones 1999) and 3D-PSSM (Kelly et al. 2000), which use very different principles in fold recognition, have been used to predict the fold of KdoK and WaaP gene products.
| Acknowledgments |
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The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 USC section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
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