Evolution of Phage Tail Sheath Protein
Sheath proteins comprise a part of the contractile molecular machinery present in bacteriophages with myoviral morphology, contractile injection systems, and the type VI secretion system (T6SS) found in many Gram-negative bacteria. A team of scientists from the Laboratory of molecular bioengineering IBCh RAS analysed 112 contractile phage tail sheath proteins (TShP) representing different groups of bacteriophages and archaeal viruses with myoviral morphology have been modelled with the novel machine learning software, AlphaFold 2. The common core domain of all studied sheath proteins, including viral and T6SS proteins, comprised both N-terminal and C-terminal parts, whereas the other parts consisted of one or several moderately conserved domains, presumably added during phage evolution. The results are published in the Viruses. Learn more
june 16, 2022