Bioinformatic study of the relationship between protein regulation and sequence properties

Abstract

Although protein expression and regulation have been intensively studied, a complete picture of its mechanisms is still to be drawn. Analysis of high-throughput quantitative proteomics data provides a way to better understand protein regulation. Here, we introduce a bioinformatic analysis method to correlate protein regulation with individual amino acid patterns. We compare the amino acid composition between groups of regulated and unregulated proteins and investigate the correlation between codon usage patterns and protein regulation levels in two Sulfolobus species in “biofilm vs planktonic” experiments. The identified amino acids can then be associated with the regulation of specific gene functions. Strikingly, our analysis shows that functional categories of regulated proteins with similar composition and codon usage pattern of specific amino acids behave similarly. This finding can contribute to a better understanding of protein and gene expression regulation and could find applications in gene optimisation.