Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on April 6, 2006
Bioinformatics 2006 22(13):1546-1550; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl137
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Intrinsically disordered C-terminal segments of voltage-activated potassium channels: a possible fishing rod-like mechanism for channel binding to scaffold proteins
1 Department of Life Sciences and the Zlotowski Center for Neurosciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Beer Sheva, Israel
2 Department of Biochemistry, Tel Aviv University Ramat Aviv, Israel
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Membrane-embedded voltage-activated potassium channels (Kv) bind intracellular scaffold proteins, such as the Post Synaptic Density 95 (PSD-95) protein, using a conserved PDZ-binding motif located at the channels' C-terminal tip. This interaction underlies Kv-channel clustering, and is important for the proper assembly and functioning of the synapse. Here we demonstrate that the C-terminal segments of Kv channels adjacent to the PDZ-binding motif are intrinsically disordered. Phylogenetic analysis of the Kv channel family reveals a cluster of channel sequences belonging to three out of the four main channel families, for which an association is demonstrated between the presence of the consensus terminal PDZ-binding motif and the intrinsically disordered nature of the immediately adjacent C-terminal segment. Our observations, combined with a structural analogy to the N-terminal intra-molecular ball-and-chain mechanism for Kv channel inactivation, suggest that the C-terminal disordered segments of these channel families encode an inter-molecular fishing rod-like mechanism for K+ channel binding to scaffold proteins.
Contact: ofery{at}bgu.ac.il
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Received on January 28, 2006; revised on March 22, 2006; accepted on April 4, 2006
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