Weighing in on a timeless controversy

Abstract

Timeless (Tim) and Period (Per) are coordinately synthesized interacting proteins that in response to positional/environmental cues comigrate to the nucleus as obligate heterodimers where they act to suppress their own gene expression as part of the circadian rhythm network in Drosophila. There has been considerable controversy about the structural nature of Tim because of somewhat conflicting results generated by the automated threading algorithm 3D-PSSM. With use of a computer-assisted but largely manual approach, it is shown here that Tim is composed of repetitive structural elements and that those elements comprise two ARM repeat domains, validating the essence of the original 3D-PSSM prediction. Eleven individual ARM structural units are assigned, and a phylogenetic analysis showing their relatedness to one another is performed. In addition, there appears to be a small domain of prenyltransferase-like repeats C-terminal to the second ARM domain, which went undetected in previous analyses. Although we cannot know the precise conformation it adopts until a structure is solved, Tim emerges here as clearly a member of the helical repeat protein superfamily. Given its role in periodic nuclear translocation, Tim may, therefore, have a functional analogy with the photoperiod-responsive protein Phor1 and other karyopherin-like molecules.