Predicted role for the archease protein family based on structural and sequence analysis of TM1083 and MTH1598, two proteins structurally characterized through structural genomics efforts

Recently, the structures of two proteins belonging to the archease family, TM1083 from Thermotoga maritima and MTH1598 from Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum, have been solved independently by two Protein Structure Initiative structural genomics pilot centers using X-ray crystallography and NMR, respectively. The archease protein family is a good example of one of the paradoxes of structural genomics: Approximately one third of protein structures produced by structural genomics centers have no known function and are still annotated as "hypothetical proteins" in the Protein Data Bank. In the case of archeases, despite the existence of two protein structures and abundant sequence information, there is still no function assigned to this protein family. Here, our group predicts, based on structural similarity, sequence conservation, and gene context analyses, that members of this protein family might function as chaperones or modulators of proteins involved in DNA/RNA processing. The conservation of genomic context for this protein family is constant from Archaea and Bacteria to humans, and suggests that unannotated open reading frames contiguous to them could be novel RNA/DNA binding proteins.