PSI Plasmid of the Month

Each month we will highlight a different PSI plasmid or plasmid collection which may interest you.

Protein Phosphatases from the NYSGXRC

Protein phosphorylation is one of the most common post-translational modifications in proteins, playing a role in biological processes such as transcriptional and translational regulation, cell signaling pathway regulation, metabolism, protein stability, cell cycle progression, cell-cell interactions, cell motility, immune response, and development. Dysfunction in protein phosphorylation or dephosphorylation has also been found to contribute to various diseases including cancer. Understanding the enzymes that are responsible for phosphorylation and dephosphorylation, kinase and phosphatases, respectively, is therefore critical to understanding how this post-translational modification affects biology.

The New York SGX Research Center for Structural Genomics (NYSGXRC), one of the Large-Scale production centers in the first two phases of the Protein Structure Initiative, focused on solving the structures of protein phosphatases from human and various pathogens as one of its Biomedical Theme projects. Their goal was to increase the structural coverage of the phosphatome by targeting their high throughput structural determination on family members lacking representatives in the PDB (described in detail in this publication 1).

In order to determine these structures, the NYSGXRC created hundreds of human and pathogen plasmid clones that, thus far, have resulted in 27 structures. The plasmids have been deposited in the PSI:Biology-Materials Repository (MR), and 232 phosphatase clones are currently available through DNASU (a complete list can be found here). Plasmids in DNASU that contain phosphatase genes whose structures were solved are listed in the table below. Highlighted Clone IDs indicate the exact plasmid that was used for solving the phosphatase structure.

Publications

1. Almo SC, Bonanno JB, Sauder JM, Emtage S, Dilorenzo TP, Malashkevich V, Wasserman SR, Swaminathan S, Eswaramoorthy S, Agarwal R, Kumaran D, Madegowda M, Ragumani S, Patskovsky Y, Alvarado J, Ramagopal UA, Faber-Barata J, Chance MR, Sali A, Fiser A, Zhang ZY, Lawrence DS, Burley SK. (2007) Structural genomics of protein phosphatases. J Struct Funct Genomics. 2007 Sep;8(2-3):121-40. Epub 2007 Dec 5. PMID: 18058037.
2. Gilbert LA, Ravindran S, Turetzky JM, Boothroyd JC, Bradley PJ. (2007) Toxoplasma gondii targets a protein phosphatase 2C to the nuclei of infected host cells. Eukaryot Cell. 2007 Jan;6(1):73-83. Epub 2006 Nov 3. PMID: 17085638

Updated for November 2010
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