Journal
JOURNAL OF DENTAL RESEARCH
Volume 91, Issue 11, Pages 1085-1089Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0022034512460551
Keywords
enamel matrix proteins; amelogenesis imperfecta; mammals; pseudogene; in silico analysis; genetic disease
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Funding
- CNRS
- Universite Pierre Marie Curie
- National Programme Hospitalier de Recherche Clinique (PHRC) from the French Ministry of Health, via the Hopitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg
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Molecular evolutionary analysis is an efficient method to predict and/or validate amino acid substitutions that could lead to a genetic disease and to highlight residues and motifs that could play an important role in the protein structure and/or function. We have applied such analysis to amelotin (AMTN), a recently identified enamel protein in the rat, mouse, and humans. An in silico search for AMTN provided 42 new mammalian sequences that were added to the 3 published sequences with which we performed the analysis using a dataset representative of all lineages (circa 220 million years of evolution), including 2 enamel-less species, sloth and armadillo. During evolution, of the 209 residues of human AMTN, 17 were unchanged and 34 had conserved their chemical properties. Substituting these important residues could lead to amelogenesis imperfecta (AI). Also, AMTN possesses a well-conserved signal peptide, 2 conserved motifs whose function is certainly important but unknown, and a putative phosphorylation site (SXE). In addition, the sequences of the 2 enamel-less species display mutations revealing that AMTN underwent pseudogenization, which suggests that AMTN is an enamel-specific protein.
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