Bioinformatic analysis of nucleotide cyclase functional centers and development of ACPred webserver

Abstract

Cyclic mononucleotides, in particular 3',5'-cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) and 3',5'-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), are molecular signals that mediate a myriad of biological responses in organisms across the tree of life. In plants, they transduce signals such as hormones and peptides perceived at receptors on the cell surface into the cytoplasm to orchestrate a cascade of biochemical reactions that enable them to grow and develop, and adapt to light, hormones, salt and drought stresses as well as pathogens. However, their generating enzymes (guanylyl cyclases, GCs and adenylyl cyclases, ACs) have just been recently discovered and are still poorly understood. Here, we employed a computational approach to probe the physicochemical properties of the catalytic centers of these enzymes and the knowledge of which, was used to create a web-based tool, ACPred (http://gcpred.com/acpred) for the prediction of AC functional centers from amino acid sequence. Understanding the nature of such catalytic centers have enabled the creation of predictive tools such as ACPred which will in turn, facilitate the discovery of novel cellular components across different systems.