首页|THESE MEGA-PROTEINS TURN BACTERIA INTO PREDATORS
THESE MEGA-PROTEINS TURN BACTERIA INTO PREDATORS
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Jacob West-Roberts, a computational biologist at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, was scouring micro-bial DNA sequences for giant genes and discovered what he thought was a whopper: a gene encoding a protein made up of 1,800 amino acids. The average protein has just a few hundred. "Wait till you see this," responded his PhD adviser, UC Berkeley environmental microbi-ologist Jillian Banfield, and pointed out that proteins longer than 30,000 amino acids were already known from sequencing data. Their team has now found dozens of even bigger proteins, including what might be the longest ever: an 85,000-amino-acid behemoth. The mega-molecules could help an enigmatic group of environmental microorganisms to feed on other microbial cells, the researchers propose. They describe their findings in a preprint posted on bioRxiv. "It's a good study," says Brian Hedlund, a microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "They essentially doubled the size of the largest known predicted proteins from 40,000 to 85,000 amino acids, which are all insane."
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