New Paper: Predicting structural features of proteins from deep-sea organisms

8 April 2022

Predicting molecular protein adaptations is a key challenge in protein engineering. In our recent publication we analyze adaptations of protein structures from deep-sea extremophiles. We collected the currently available protein structures from deep-sea organisms from the PDB and paired them with orthologous proteins from other environments. We used the data set to exhaustively evaluate the protein pairs with machine learning to determine characteristic differences in sequence and structure. The results show a reasonable discrimination of deep-sea and nondeep-sea proteins from which we distinguish correlations previously attributed to thermal stability from other signals potentially describing adaptions to high pressure. The paper and the compiled data set of protein structure pairs are openly available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/prot.26337 and https://www.zbh.uni-hamburg.de/forschung/amd/datasets.html.