Researchers at the IBB-UAB have developed the most comprehensive database available to date to help understand the basis of protein aggregation, a phenomenon associated with aging and several pathologies. The new resource, A3D-MOBD, brings together the proteomes of 12 of the most studied model organisms, which cover distant biological clades, and contains more than half a million predictions of protein regions with a propensity to form aggregates. The A3D-MOBD was developed by the Protein Folding and Computational Diseases Group at the Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (IBB-UAB), which is directed by Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Professor Salvador Ventura. In collaboration with scientists from the University of Warsaw, the study was recently published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. It provides pre-calculated aggregation propensity analyses and tools for the study of this phenomenon on a proteomic scale as well as evolutionary comparison between different species.
The new resource builds on the method that the same research group designed in 2015, Aggrescan 3D, but significantly expands the obtainable data. In total, it contains more than 500,000 structural predictions for more than 160,000 proteins from 12 highly characterized model organisms widely used in biology, biotechnology and biomedicine research.
It includes the herbaceous plant Arabidopsis thaliana, nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, zebrafish Danio rerio, enteric bacterium Escherichia coli, minimal genome bacteria Mycoplasma genitalium, mouse Mus musculus, fusion and fission yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, human Homo sapiens, rat Rattus norvegicus, fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and COVID-19 causative virus SARS-CoV-2.
By Autonomous University of Barcelona
Article can be accessed on: phys.org