Correlation of Metabolic Pathways with the Primary Structure in Acetylated Proteins

Abstract

Signaling pathways are the major component in cellular networks, but most studies done recently on signaling pathways were either aimed to enhance various molecular predictions using pathways as contexts or focused to predict pathways indirectly. The former assumed that the pathways for the biomolecules (genes or proteins) used in the modelling were known. Although the latter was well suiting the biosciences researches at the systems level, the indirect predictions would more or less rely on the prediction accuracy of other systems. So far no work whatsoever has been done for studying the direct correlation between signaling pathways and protein primary structures although acetylated proteins are one of the main players in metabolic signaling pathways. In order to investigate their correlation, the sequences of 76 experimentally verified acetylated proteins were downloaded from NCBI. They cover three major metabolic pathways, i.e., biosynthesis, degradation, and metabolism. Without any a prior knowledge about how these three metabolic pathways are correlated with the primary structures of acetylated proteins, we proposed some classification models between the pathways. It has been found through computer simulations that the signaling pathways are indeed correlated with the primary structures in acetylated proteins, further demonstrating the well-known biological law that sequence determines structure and structure determines function.