Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 19, 2026

Author Spotlight: A Computational Approach to Decipher Amino Acid Preferences in Multispecific Protein-Protein Interactions
Published on: January 26, 2024
Single asparagine to arginine mutation allows PerR to switch from PerR box to fur box
Christelle Caux-Thang1, Aubérie Parent2, Ramakrishnan Sethu3
1§CNRS UMR 5249, LCBM, F-38054 Grenoble, France.
Abstract:
Fur family proteins, ubiquitous in prokaryotes, play a pivotal role in microbial survival and virulence in most pathogens. Metalloregulators, such as Fur and PerR, regulate the transcription of genes connected to iron homeostasis and response to oxidative stress, respectively. In Bacillus subtilis, Fur and PerR bind with high affinity to DNA sequences differing at only two nucleotides. In addition to these differences in the PerR and Fur boxes, we identify in this study a residue located on the DNA binding motif of the Fur protein that is critical to discrimination between the two close DNA sequences. Interestingly, when this residue is introduced into PerR, it lowers the affinity of PerR for its own DNA target but confers to the protein the ability to interact strongly with the Fur DNA binding sequence. The present data show how two closely related proteins have distinct biological properties just by changing a single residue.
More Related Videos
10:31Residue-Specific Exchange of Proline by Proline Analogs in Fluorescent Proteins: How "Molecular Surgery" of the Backbone Affects Folding and Stability
Published on: February 3, 2022
06:35A Scalable, Cell-Based Method for the Functional Assessment of Ube3a Variants
Published on: October 10, 2022
Related Concept Videos
Allosteric Proteins-ATCase
Aspartate transcarbamoylase (ATCase) is a cytosolic enzyme that catalyzes the condensation of L-aspartate and carbamoyl phosphate to N-carbamoyl-L-aspartate. This reaction is the first step in pyrimidine biosynthesis. UTP and CTP, the end products of the pyrimidine synthesis...
Mutations
Mutations
Chromosomal Alterations Are Large-Scale Mutations
While point mutations are changes in a single nucleotide in...
Conserved Binding Sites
Binding sites are often located in large pockets, and if their location on a protein’s surface is unknown, it can be predicted using various approaches. The energetic method computationally...
Ligand Binding and Linkage
Protein Complexes with Interchangeable Parts
The SCF ubiquitin ligase is a protein complex of five individual proteins. This complex attaches ubiquitin to other target proteins to mark them for degradation. In order...