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Application
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Aquaporins: Are regions of the protein conserved?
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Educators |
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The osmotic controlled passage of polar water through fundamentally nonpolar biologic lipid bilayers (membranes) wasn't understood until the work of Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon on aquaporins resulting in the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2003. We decided to examine conservation in aquaporins. A Google search provided us with both the PDB id (1h6i) of the human aquaporin A chain from RBCs, and a clearer understanding that the aquaprorins represent a related group of proteins present in multiple species. At http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/ we conducted an initial investigation of the structure of 1h6i. At consurf (http://consurf.tau.ac.il/) we were able to obtain the protein sequences for the best 20 matches in nearly FASTA form. After text editing we ran Clustalw and retrieved both rooted and unrooted trees. In the trees, it is easy to see the families of aquaporins (type 1, 2 etc; see tree.doc below). |
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The Biology Workbench |
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http://workbench.sdsc.edu/ |
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Compare the structural similarities 1. between types of aquaporins 2. between human aquaporins and within groups of aquaporins. |
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