In silico analysis of baculovirus enhancin genes

Arc (Activity regulated cytoskeleton associated protein) is a key regulator of synaptic plasticity. Its gene was emerged from the retrotransposon Gag capsid genes . In the nervous system, it is responsible for intercellular transfer of mRNA to the cytoplasm of neurons through endocytosis via its virion-like capsid. In current work, a comperehensive sequence and structural analysis was performed on the Human Arc protein and its homologoues counterparts found in other organisms. For sequence analysis, we used Bioinformatics tools including the BLAST , ClustalW , ESpript and finally a representative sequence of programs in the Phylip package to deduce the evolutionary history of the Arc proteins. The structural features of the Arc protein have been studied using a combination of Bioinformatics and Computational tools. Currently, there is no structural report on the whole structure of protein, and the reported structural data in the PDB database is limited to specific fragments of the original sequence from various organisms (UniProt codes: Q۷LC۴۴, Q۶۳۰۵۳, Q۷K۱U۰, and Q۷JV۷۰). We used these fragments as templates to build a compact structure for the human variant Arc protein. Due to the structural data limitation, the final structure was built and validate with a combinatorial approach using respective online servers and the MODELLER program (Ver. ۱۰.۴). We used the capabilities of the UCSF Chimera program to visualize and structural analysis on the selected models.

کلیدواژه ها:

Baculoviridae ، Codon ، Enhancin ، Phylogenetic relationship