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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Analysis of Cap-binding Proteins in Human Cells Exposed to Physiological Oxygen Conditions
Published on: December 28, 2016
Oxygen content of transmembrane proteins over macroevolutionary time scales
Claudia Acquisti1, Jürgen Kleffe, Sinéad Collins
1Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linnè-Weg 10, 50829 Köln, Germany. Claudia.Acquisti.1@asu.edu
Abstract:
We observe that the time of appearance of cellular compartmentalization correlates with atmospheric oxygen concentration. To explore this correlation, we predict and characterize the topology of all transmembrane proteins in 19 taxa and correlate differences in topology with historical atmospheric oxygen concentrations. Here we show that transmembrane proteins, individually and as a group, were probably selectively excluding oxygen in ancient ancestral taxa, and that this constraint decreased over time when atmospheric oxygen levels rose. As this constraint decreased, the size and number of communication-related transmembrane proteins increased. We suggest the hypothesis that atmospheric oxygen concentrations affected the timing of the evolution of cellular compartmentalization by constraining the size of domains necessary for communication across membranes.
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