scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Predictive motifs derived from cytosine methyltransferases

Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
Five highly conserved motifs occur in a mammalian methyltransferase responsible for the formation of 5-methylcytosine within CG dinucleotides, and can be used to discriminate the known 5- methylcytOSine forming methyltransferases from all other methyl transferases of known sequence, and from allother identified proteins in the PIR, GenBank and EMBL databases.
Abstract
Thirteen bacterial DNA methyltransferases that catalyze the formation of 5-methylcytosine within specific DNA sequences possess related structures. Similar building blocks (motifs), containing invariant positions, can be found in the same order in all thirteen sequences. Five of these blocks are highly conserved while a further five contain weaker similarities. One block, which has the most invariant residues, contains the proline-cysteine dipeptide of the proposed catalytic site. A region in the second half of each sequence is unusually variable both in length and sequence composition. Those methyltransferases that exhibit significant homology in this region share common specificity in DNA recognition. The five highly conserved motifs can be used to discriminate the known 5-methylcytosine forming methyltransferases from all other methyltransferases of known sequence, and from all other identified proteins in the PIR, GenBank and EMBL databases. These five motifs occur in a mammalian methyltransferase responsible for the formation of 5-methylcytosine within CG dinucleotides. By searching the unidentified open reading frames present in the GenBank and EMBL databases, two potential 5-methylcytosine forming methyltransferases have been found.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Targeted mutation of the DNA methyltransferase gene results in embryonic lethality.

TL;DR: Results indicate that while a 3-fold reduction in levels of genomic m5C has no detectable effect on the viability or proliferation of ES cells in culture, a similar reduction of DNA methylation in embryos causes abnormal development and embryonic lethality.
Journal ArticleDOI

The DNA methyltransferases of mammals

TL;DR: The biological significance of 5-methylcytosine was in doubt for many years, but is no longer, and it has become clear that programmed changes in methylation patterns are less important in the regulation of mammalian development than was previously believed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Eukaryotic cytosine methyltransferases.

TL;DR: There are multiple families of DNA (cytosine-5) methyltransferases in eukaryotes, and each family appears to be controlled by different regulatory inputs.
Journal ArticleDOI

Detecting Subtle Sequence Signals: A Gibbs Sampling Strategy for Multiple Alignment

TL;DR: A mathematical definition of this "local multiple alignment" problem suitable for full computer automation has been used to develop a new and sensitive algorithm, based on the statistical method of iterative sampling, that finds an optimized local alignment model for N sequences in N-linear time, requiring only seconds on current workstations.
Journal ArticleDOI

5-Azacytidine and 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine as inhibitors of DNA methylation: mechanistic studies and their implications for cancer therapy.

TL;DR: The current status of the understanding of the mechanism(s) by which 5-azacytosine residues in DNA inhibit DNA methylation is reviewed with an emphasis on the interactions of these residues with bacterial and mammalian DNA (cytosines-C5) methyltransferases.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Rapid and sensitive protein similarity searches

TL;DR: An algorithm was developed which facilitates the search for similarities between newly determined amino acid sequences and sequences already available in databases and increases sensitivity by giving high scores to those amino acid replacements which occur frequently in evolution.
Journal ArticleDOI

The leucine zipper: a hypothetical structure common to a new class of DNA binding proteins

TL;DR: A 30-amino-acid segment of C/EBP, a newly discovered enhancer binding protein, shares notable sequence similarity with a segment of the cellular Myc transforming protein, and may represent a characteristic property of a new category of DNA binding proteins.
Journal ArticleDOI

Progressive sequence alignment as a prerequisite to correct phylogenetic trees.

TL;DR: A progressive alignment method that utilizes the Needleman and Wunsch pairwise alignment algorithm iteratively to achieve the multiple alignment of a set of protein sequences and to construct an evolutionary tree depicting their relationship is described.
Journal ArticleDOI

Cloning and sequencing of a cDNA encoding DNA methyltransferase of mouse cells: The carboxyl-terminal domain of the mammalian enzymes is related to bacterial restriction methyltransferases☆

TL;DR: A cDNA encoding DNA (cytosine-5)-methyltransferase (DNA MeTase) of mouse cells has been cloned and sequenced and shows striking similarities to bacterial type II DNA cytosine methyltransferases and appears to represent a catalytic methyltransferase domain.
Book

Graphs, Networks and Algorithms

TL;DR: This book presents a meta-analsis of the network simplex algorithm and a section on the five color theorem, which states that the color theorem can be rewritten as a graph representation of a network.
Related Papers (5)