Identification of New FG-Repeat Nucleoporins with Amyloid Properties

Amyloids are fibrillar protein aggregates with a cross-β structure. More than two hundred different proteins with amyloid or amyloid-like properties are already known. Functional amyloids with conservative amyloidogenic regions were found in different organisms. Protein aggregation appears to be beneficial for the organism in these cases. Therefore, this property might be conservative for orthologous proteins. The amyloid aggregates of the CPEB protein were suggested to play an important role in the long-term memory formation in Aplysia californica, Drosophila melanogaster, and Mus musculus. Moreover, the FXR1 protein demonstrates amyloid properties among the Vertebrates. A few nucleoporins (e.g., yeast Nup49, Nup100, Nup116, and human Nup153 and Nup58), are supposed or proved to form amyloid fibrils. In this study, we performed wide-scale bioinformatic analysis of nucleoporins with FG-repeats (phenylalanine-glycine repeats). We demonstrated that most of the barrier nucleoporins possess potential amyloidogenic properties. Furthermore, the aggregation-prone properties of several Nsp1 and Nup100 orthologs in bacteria and yeast cells were analyzed. Only two new nucleoporins, Drosophila melanogaster Nup98 and Schizosaccharomyces pombe Nup98, aggregated in different experiments. At the same time, Taeniopygia guttata Nup58 only formed amyloids in bacterial cells. These results rather contradict the hypothesis about the functional aggregation of nucleoporins.