News

Head of the work group: Prof.Kalina

Recent Submissions

  • Epistatic interactions promote persistence of NS3-Q80K in HCV infection by compensating for protein folding instability.

    Dultz, Georg; Srikakulam, Sanjay K; Konetschnik, Michael; Shimakami, Tetsuro; Doncheva, Nadezhda T; Dietz, Julia; Sarrazin, Christoph; Biondi, Ricardo M; Zeuzem, Stefan; Tampé, Robert; et al. (Elsevier, 2021-07-31)
    The Q80K polymorphism in the NS3-4A protease of the hepatitis C virus is associated with treatment failure of direct-acting antiviral agents. This polymorphism is highly prevalent in genotype 1a infections and stably transmitted between hosts. Here, we investigated the underlying molecular mechanisms of evolutionarily conserved coevolving amino acids in NS3-Q80K and revealed potential implications of epistatic interactions in immune escape and variants persistence. Using purified protein, we characterized the impact of epistatic amino acid substitutions on the physicochemical properties and peptide cleavage kinetics of the NS3-Q80K protease. We found that Q80K destabilized the protease protein fold (p < 0.0001). Although NS3-Q80K showed reduced peptide substrate turnover (p < 0.0002), replicative fitness in an H77S.3 cell culture model of infection was not significantly inferior to the WT virus. Epistatic substitutions at residues 91 and 174 in NS3-Q80K stabilized the protein fold (p < 0.0001) and leveraged the WT protease stability. However, changes in protease stability inversely correlated with enzymatic activity. In infectious cell culture, these secondary substitutions were not associated with a gain of replicative fitness in NS3-Q80K variants. Using molecular dynamics, we observed that the total number of residue contacts in NS3-Q80K mutants correlated with protein folding stability. Changes in the number of contacts reflected the compensatory effect on protein folding instability by epistatic substitutions. In summary, epistatic substitutions in NS3-Q80K contribute to viral fitness by mechanisms not directly related to RNA replication. By compensating for protein-folding instability, epistatic interactions likely protect NS3-Q80K variants from immune cell recognition.
  • An extended catalogue of tandem alternative splice sites in human tissue transcriptomes.

    Mironov, Aleksei; Denisov, Stepan; Gress, Alexander; Kalinina, Olga V; Pervouchine, Dmitri D; HIPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (PLOS, 2021-04-07)
    Tandem alternative splice sites (TASS) is a special class of alternative splicing events that are characterized by a close tandem arrangement of splice sites. Most TASS lack functional characterization and are believed to arise from splicing noise. Based on the RNA-seq data from the Genotype Tissue Expression project, we present an extended catalogue of TASS in healthy human tissues and analyze their tissue-specific expression. The expression of TASS is usually dominated by one major splice site (maSS), while the expression of minor splice sites (miSS) is at least an order of magnitude lower. Among 46k miSS with sufficient read support, 9k (20%) are significantly expressed above the expected noise level, and among them 2.5k are expressed tissue-specifically. We found significant correlations between tissue-specific expression of RNA-binding proteins (RBP), tissue-specific expression of miSS, and miSS response to RBP inactivation by shRNA. In combination with RBP profiling by eCLIP, this allowed prediction of novel cases of tissue-specific splicing regulation including a miSS in QKI mRNA that is likely regulated by PTBP1. The analysis of human primary cell transcriptomes suggested that both tissue-specific and cell-type-specific factors contribute to the regulation of miSS expression. More than 20% of tissue-specific miSS affect structured protein regions and may adjust protein-protein interactions or modify the stability of the protein core. The significantly expressed miSS evolve under the same selection pressure as maSS, while other miSS lack signatures of evolutionary selection and conservation. Using mixture models, we estimated that not more than 15% of maSS and not more than 54% of tissue-specific miSS are noisy, while the proportion of noisy splice sites among non-significantly expressed miSS is above 63%.
  • DIGGER: exploring the functional role of alternative splicing in protein interactions.

    Louadi, Zakaria; Yuan, Kevin; Gress, Alexander; Tsoy, Olga; Kalinina, Olga V; Baumbach, Jan; Kacprowski, Tim; List, Markus; IPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (OxfordUniversity Press, 2020-09-25)
    Alternative splicing plays a major role in regulating the functional repertoire of the proteome. However, isoform-specific effects to protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are usually overlooked, making it impossible to judge the functional role of individual exons on a systems biology level. We overcome this barrier by integrating protein-protein interactions, domain-domain interactions and residue-level interactions information to lift exon expression analysis to a network level. Our user-friendly database DIGGER is available at https://exbio.wzw.tum.de/digger and allows users to seamlessly switch between isoform and exon-centric views of the interactome and to extract sub-networks of relevant isoforms, making it an essential resource for studying mechanistic consequences of alternative splicing.
  • The bottromycin epimerase BotH defines a group of atypical α/β-hydrolase-fold enzymes.

    Sikandar, Asfandyar; Franz, Laura; Adam, Sebastian; Santos-Aberturas, Javier; Horbal, Liliya; Luzhetskyy, Andriy; Truman, Andrew W; Kalinina, Olga V; Koehnke, Jesko; HIPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (Springer Nature, 2020-06-29)
    d-amino acids endow peptides with diverse, desirable properties, but the post-translational and site-specific epimerization of l-amino acids into their d-counterparts is rare and chemically challenging. Bottromycins are ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides that have overcome this challenge and feature a d-aspartate (d-Asp), which was proposed to arise spontaneously during biosynthesis. We have identified the highly unusual α/β-hydrolase (ABH) fold enzyme BotH as a peptide epimerase responsible for the post-translational epimerization of l-Asp to d-Asp during bottromycin biosynthesis. The biochemical characterization of BotH combined with the structures of BotH and the BotH–substrate complex allowed us to propose a mechanism for this reaction. Bioinformatic analyses of BotH homologs show that similar ABH enzymes are found in diverse biosynthetic gene clusters. This places BotH as the founding member of a group of atypical ABH enzymes that may be able to epimerize non-Asp stereocenters across different families of secondary metabolites.
  • A shift of dynamic equilibrium between the KIT active and inactive states causes drug resistance.

    Srikakulam, Sanjay K; Bastys, Tomas; Kalinina, Olga V; HIPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (Wiley, 2020-06-12)
    Integrative bioinformatics is an emerging field in the big data era, offering a steadily increasing number of algorithms and analysis tools. However, for researchers in experimental life sciences it is often difficult to follow and properly apply the bioinformatical methods in order to unravel the complexity and systemic effects of omics data. Here, we present an integrative bioinformatics pipeline to decipher crucial biological insights from global transcriptome profiling data to validate innovative therapeutics. It is available as a web application for an interactive and simplified analysis without the need for programming skills or deep bioinformatics background. The approach was applied to an ex vivo cardiac model treated with natural anti-fibrotic compounds and we obtained new mechanistic insights into their anti-fibrotic action and molecular interplay with miRNAs in cardiac fibrosis. Several gene pathways associated with proliferation, extracellular matrix processes and wound healing were altered, and we could identify micro (mi) RNA-21-5p and miRNA-223-3p as key molecular components related to the anti-fibrotic treatment. Importantly, our pipeline is not restricted to a specific cell type or disease and can be broadly applied to better understand the unprecedented level of complexity in big data research.
  • SphereCon-a method for precise estimation of residue relative solvent accessible area from limited structural information.

    Gress, Alexander; Kalinina, Olga V; HIPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (Oxford Academic, 2020-03-10)
    Motivation: In proteins, solvent accessibility of individual residues is a factor contributing to their importance for protein function and stability. Hence one might wish to calculate solvent accessibility in order to predict the impact of mutations, their pathogenicity and for other biomedical applications. A direct computation of solvent accessibility is only possible if all atoms of a protein three-dimensional structure are reliably resolved. Results: We present SphereCon, a new precise measure that can estimate residue relative solvent accessibility (RSA) from limited data. The measure is based on calculating the volume of intersection of a sphere with a cone cut out in the direction opposite of the residue with surrounding atoms. We propose a method for estimating the position and volume of residue atoms in cases when they are not known from the structure, or when the structural data are unreliable or missing. We show that in cases of reliable input structures, SphereCon correlates almost perfectly with the directly computed RSA, and outperforms other previously suggested indirect methods. Moreover, SphereCon is the only measure that yields accurate results when the identities of amino acids are unknown. A significant novel feature of SphereCon is that it can estimate RSA from inter-residue distance and contact matrices, without any information about the actual atom coordinates.
  • Adenosine-to-Inosine RNA Editing in Mouse and Human Brain Proteomes.

    Levitsky, Lev I; Kliuchnikova, Anna A; Kuznetsova, Ksenia G; Karpov, Dmitry S; Ivanov, Mark V; Pyatnitskiy, Mikhail A; Kalinina, Olga V; Gorshkov, Mikhail V; Moshkovskii, Sergei A; HIPS, Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland, Universitätscampus E8.1 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019-10-01)
    Proteogenomics is based on the use of customized genome or RNA sequencing databases for interrogation of shotgun proteomics data in search for proteome-level evidence of genome variations or RNA editing. In this work, we identified the products of adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in human and murine brain proteomes using publicly available brain proteome LC-MS/MS datasets and an RNA editome database compiled from several sources. After filtering of false-positive results, 20 and 37 sites of editing in proteins belonging to 14 and 32 genes were identified for murine and human brain proteomes, respectively. Eight sites of editing identified with high spectral counts overlapped between human and mouse brain samples. Some of these sites were previously reported using orthogonal methods, such as NMDA glutamate receptors, CYFIP2, coatomer alpha, etc. Also, differential editing between neurons and microglia was demonstrated in this work for some of the proteins from primary murine brain cell cultures. Because many edited sites are still not characterized functionally at the protein level, our results provide a necessary background for their further analysis in normal and diseased cells and tissues using targeted proteomic approaches.