Maintenance of a Protein Structure in the Dynamic Evolution of TIMPs over 600 Million Years.

ABSTRACT: Deciphering the events leading to protein evolution represents a challenge, especially for protein families showing complex evolutionary history. Among them, TIMPs represent an ancient eukaryotic protein family widely distributed in the animal kingdom. They are known to control the turnover of the extracellular matrix and are considered to arise early during metazoan evolution, arguably tuning essential features of tissue and epithelial organization. To probe the structure and molecular evolution of TIMPs within metazoans, we report the mining and structural characterization of a large data set of TIMPs over approximately 600 Myr. The TIMPs repertoire was explored starting from the Cnidaria phylum, coeval with the origins of connective tissue, to great apes and humans. Despite dramatic seq

SUBMITTER: Nicosia A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4860685 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature