Statistical sequence analyses of G-protein-coupled receptors: structural and functional characteristics viewed with...

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play a crucial role in signal transduction and receive a wide variety of ligands. GPCRs are a major target in drug design, as nearly 50% of all contemporary medicines act on GPCRs. GPCRs are membrane proteins possessing a common structural feature, seven transmembrane helices. In order to design an effective drug to act on a GPCR, knowledge of the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the target GPCR is indispensable. However, as GPCRs are membrane bound, their 3D structures are difficult to obtain. Thus we conducted statistical sequence analyses to find information about 3D structure and ligand binding using the receptors' primary sequences. We present statistical sequence analyses of 270 human GPCRs with regard to entropy (Shannon entropy in sequence alignment), hydrophobicity and volume, which are associated with the alpha-helical periodicity of the accessibility to the surrounding lipid. We found periodicity such that the phase changes once in the middle of each transmembrane region, both in the entropy plot and in the hydrophobicity plot. The phase shift in the entropy plot reflects the variety of ligands and the generality of the mechanism of signal transduction. The two periodic regions in the hydrophobicity plot indicate the regions facing the hydrophobic lipid chain and the polar phospholipid headgroup. We also found a simple periodicity in the plot of volume deviation, which suggests conservation of the stable structural packing among the transmembrane helices.