Structural modeling reveals viral proteins that manipulate host immune signaling.

ABSTRACT: Immune pathways that use intracellular nucleotide signaling are common in animals, plants and bacteria. Viruses can inhibit nucleotide immune signaling by producing proteins that sequester or cleave the immune signals. Here we analyzed evolutionarily unrelated signal-sequestering viral proteins, finding that they share structural and biophysical traits in their genetic organization, ternary structures and binding pocket properties. Based on these traits we developed a structure-guided computational pipeline that can sift through large phage genome databases to unbiasedly predict phage proteins that manipulate bacterial immune signaling. Numerous previously uncharacterized proteins, grouped into three families, were verified to inhibit the bacterial Thoeris and CBASS signaling systems. Prot

SUBMITTER: Tal N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12265669 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature