Summary: Negative regulator of genetic competence (MecA)

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Negative regulator of genetic competence (MecA) Provide feedback

This family contains several bacterial MecA proteins. The development of competence in Bacillus subtilis is regulated by growth conditions and several regulatory genes. In complex media competence development is poor, and there is little or no expression of late competence genes. Mec mutations permit competence development and late competence gene expression in complex media, bypassing the requirements for many of the competence regulatory genes. The mecA gene product acts negatively in the development of competence. Null mutations in mecA allow expression of a late competence gene comG, under conditions where it is not normally expressed, including in complex media and in cells mutant for several competence regulatory genes. Overexpression of MecA inhibits comG transcription [1,2,3].

Literature references

Kong L, Siranosian KJ, Grossman AD, Dubnau D; , Mol Microbiol 1993;9:365-373.: Sequence and properties of mecA, a negative regulator of genetic competence in Bacillus subtilis. PUBMED:8412687 EPMC:8412687
Nakano MM, Nakano S, Zuber P; , Mol Microbiol 2002;44:1341-1349.: Spx (YjbD), a negative effector of competence in Bacillus subtilis, enhances ClpC-MecA-ComK interaction. PUBMED:12028382 EPMC:12028382
Borezee E, Msadek T, Durant L, Berche P; , J Bacteriol 2000;182:5931-5934.: Identification in Listeria monocytogenes of MecA, a homologue of the Bacillus subtilis competence regulatory protein. PUBMED:11004200 EPMC:11004200

This tab holds annotation information from the InterPro database.

InterPro entry IPR008681

Competence is the ability of a cell to take up exogenous DNA from its environment, resulting in transformation. It is widespread among bacteria and is probably an important mechanism for the horizontal transfer of genes. DNA usually becomes available by the death and lysis of other cells. Competent bacteria use components of extracellular filaments called type 4 pili to create pores in their membranes and pull DNA through the pores into the cytoplasm. This process, including the development of competence and the expression of the uptake machinery, is regulated in response to cell-cell signalling and/or nutritional conditions [PUBMED:8901420].

This family contains several bacterial MecA proteins. In complex media competence development is poor, and there is little or no expression of late competence genes. Overexpression of MecA inhibits comG transcription [PUBMED:11004200, PUBMED:12028382, PUBMED:8412687].

MecA enables the recognition and targeting of unfolded and aggregated proteins to the ClpC protease or to other proteins involved in proteolysis. It acts negatively in the development of competence by binding ComK and recruiting it to the ClpCP protease. When overexpressed, it inhibits sporulation. It is also involved in Spx degradation by ClpC [PUBMED:11004200].

Domain organisation

Below is a listing of the unique domain organisations or architectures in which this domain is found. More...

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Alignments

We store a range of different sequence alignments for families. As well as the seed alignment from which the family is built, we provide the full alignment, generated by searching the sequence database (reference proteomes) using the family HMM. We also generate alignments using four representative proteomes (RP) sets, the UniProtKB sequence database, the NCBI sequence database, and our metagenomics sequence database. More...

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. We provide several sequence viewers and a plain-text Stockholm-format file for download.

Alignment types

We make a range of alignments for each Pfam-A family:

seed: the curated alignment from which the HMM for the family is built
full: the alignment generated by searching the sequence database using the HMM
RP15/RP35/RP55/RP75: Representative Proteomes (RPs) at 15%, 35%, 55% and 75% co-membership thresholds
UniProt: alignment generated by searching the UniProtKB sequence database using the family HMM
NCBI: alignment generated by searching the NCBI sequence database using the family HMM
meta: alignment generated by searching the metagenomics sequence database using the family HMM

Viewing

You can see the alignments as HTML or in three different sequence viewers:

jalview: a Java applet developed at the University of Dundee. You will need Java installed before running jalview
HTML: an HTML page showing the whole alignment.Please note: full Pfam alignments can be very large. These HTML views are extremely large and often cause problems for browsers. Please use either jalview or the Pfam viewer if you have trouble viewing the HTML version
PP/Heatmap: an HTML-based representation of the alignment, coloured according to the posterior-probability (PP) values from the HMM. As for the standard HTML view, heatmap alignments can also be very large and slow to render.

Reformatting

You can download (or view in your browser) a text representation of a Pfam alignment in various formats:

Selex
Stockholm
FASTA
MSF

You can also change the order in which sequences are listed in the alignment, change how insertions are represented, alter the characters that are used to represent gaps in sequences and, finally, choose whether to download the alignment or to view it in your browser directly.

Downloading

You may find that large alignments cause problems for the viewers and the reformatting tool, so we also provide all alignments in Stockholm format. You can download either the plain text alignment, or a gzipped version of it.

View options

We make a range of alignments for each Pfam-A family. You can see a description of each above. You can view these alignments in various ways but please note that some types of alignment are never generated while others may not be available for all families, most commonly because the alignments are too large to handle.

	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	Representative proteomes				UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	RP15 (141)	RP35 (846)	RP55 (1584)	RP75 (2617)	UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
Jalview	View	View	View	View	View	View	View	View	View
HTML	View	View
PP/heatmap	₁	View

¹Cannot generate PP/Heatmap alignments for seeds; no PP data available

Key: available, not generated, — not available.

Format an alignment

	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	Representative proteomes				UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	RP15 (141)	RP35 (846)	RP55 (1584)	RP75 (2617)	UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
Alignment:
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

We make all of our alignments available in Stockholm format. You can download them here as raw, plain text files or as gzip-compressed files.

	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	Representative proteomes				UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
	Seed (148)	Full (1580)	RP15 (141)	RP35 (846)	RP55 (1584)	RP75 (2617)	UniProt (6885)	NCBI (7414)	Meta (6)
Raw Stockholm	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download
Gzipped	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download

You can also download a FASTA format file containing the full-length sequences for all sequences in the full alignment.

HMM logo

HMM logos is one way of visualising profile HMMs. Logos provide a quick overview of the properties of an HMM in a graphical form. You can see a more detailed description of HMM logos and find out how you can interpret them here. More...

Trees

This page displays the phylogenetic tree for this family's seed alignment. We use FastTree to calculate neighbour join trees with a local bootstrap based on 100 resamples (shown next to the tree nodes). FastTree calculates approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from our seed alignment.

Note: You can also download the data file for the tree.

Curation and family details

This section shows the detailed information about the Pfam family. You can see the definitions of many of the terms in this section in the glossary and a fuller explanation of the scoring system that we use in the scores section of the help pages.

Curation

Seed source:

DOMO:DM05333;

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Family

Sequence Ontology:

SO:0100021

Author:

Moxon SJ

Number in seed:

148

Number in full:

1580

Average length of the domain:

182.70 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

23 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

98.20 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

build method: hmmbuild -o /dev/null HMM SEED

search method: hmmsearch -Z 47079205 -E 1000 --cpu 4 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	22.4	22.4
Trusted cut-off	22.8	22.7
Noise cut-off	22.3	22.3

Model length:

227

Family (HMM) version:

13

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

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Colour assignments

Archea	Eukaryota
Bacteria	Other sequences
Viruses	Unclassified
Viroids	Unclassified sequence

Selections

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This visualisation provides a simple graphical representation of the distribution of this family across species. You can find the original interactive tree in the adjacent tab. More...

This chart is a modified "sunburst" visualisation of the species tree for this family. It shows each node in the tree as a separate arc, arranged radially with the superkingdoms at the centre and the species arrayed around the outermost ring.

How the sunburst is generated

The tree is built by considering the taxonomic lineage of each sequence that has a match to this family. For each node in the resulting tree, we draw an arc in the sunburst. The radius of the arc, its distance from the root node at the centre of the sunburst, shows the taxonomic level ("superkingdom", "kingdom", etc). The length of the arc represents either the number of sequences represented at a given level, or the number of species that are found beneath the node in the tree. The weighting scheme can be changed using the sunburst controls.

In order to reduce the complexity of the representation, we reduce the number of taxonomic levels that we show. We consider only the following eight major taxonomic levels:

superkingdom
kingdom
phylum
class
order
family
genus
species

Colouring and labels

Segments of the tree are coloured approximately according to their superkingdom. For example, archeal branches are coloured with shades of orange, eukaryotes in shades of purple, etc. The colour assignments are shown under the sunburst controls. Where space allows, the name of the taxonomic level will be written on the arc itself.

As you move your mouse across the sunburst, the current node will be highlighted. In the top section of the controls panel we show a summary of the lineage of the currently highlighed node. If you pause over an arc, a tooltip will be shown, giving the name of the taxonomic level in the title and a summary of the number of sequences and species below that node in the tree.

Anomalies in the taxonomy tree

There are some situations that the sunburst tree cannot easily handle and for which we have work-arounds in place.

Missing taxonomic levels

Some species in the taxonomic tree may not have one or more of the main eight levels that we display. For example, Bos taurus is not assigned an order in the NCBI taxonomic tree. In such cases we mark the omitted level with, for example, "No order", in both the tooltip and the lineage summary.

Unmapped species names

The tree is built by looking at each sequence in the full alignment for the family. We take the name of the species given by UniProt and try to map that to the full taxonomic tree from NCBI. In some cases, the name chosen by UniProt does not map to any node in the NCBI tree, perhaps because the chosen name is listed as a synonym or a misspelling in the NCBI taxonomy.

So that these nodes are not simply omitted from the sunburst tree, we group them together in a separate branch (or segment of the sunburst tree). Since we cannot determine the lineage for these unmapped species, we show all levels between the superkingdom and the species as "uncategorised".

Sub-species

Since we reduce the species tree to only the eight main taxonomic levels, sequences that are mapped to the sub-species level in the tree would not normally be shown. Rather than leave out these species, we map them instead to their parent species. So, for example, for sequences belonging to one of the Vibrio cholerae sub-species in the NCBI taxonomy, we show them instead as belonging to the species Vibrio cholerae.

Too many species/sequences

For large species trees, you may see blank regions in the outer layers of the sunburst. These occur when there are large numbers of arcs to be drawn in a small space. If an arc is less than approximately one pixel wide, it will not be drawn and the space will be left blank. You may still be able to get some information about the species in that region by moving your mouse across the area, but since each arc will be very small, it will be difficult to accurately locate a particular species.

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Tree controls

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The tree shows the occurrence of this domain across different species. More...

Species trees

We show the species tree in one of two ways. For smaller trees we try to show an interactive representation, which allows you to select specific nodes in the tree and view them as an alignment or as a set of Pfam domain graphics.

Unfortunately we have found that there are problems viewing the interactive tree when the it becomes larger than a certain limit. Furthermore, we have found that Internet Explorer can become unresponsive when viewing some trees, regardless of their size. We therefore show a text representation of the species tree when the size is above a certain limit or if you are using Internet Explorer to view the site.

If you are using IE you can still load the interactive tree by clicking the "Generate interactive tree" button, but please be aware of the potential problems that the interactive species tree can cause.

Interactive tree

For all of the domain matches in a full alignment, we count the number that are found on all sequences in the alignment. This total is shown in the purple box.

We also count the number of unique sequences on which each domain is found, which is shown in green. Note that a domain may appear multiple times on the same sequence, leading to the difference between these two numbers.

Finally, we group sequences from the same organism according to the NCBI code that is assigned by UniProt, allowing us to count the number of distinct sequences on which the domain is found. This value is shown in the pink boxes.

We use the NCBI species tree to group organisms according to their taxonomy and this forms the structure of the displayed tree. Note that in some cases the trees are too large (have too many nodes) to allow us to build an interactive tree, but in most cases you can still view the tree in a plain text, non-interactive representation. Those species which are represented in the seed alignment for this domain are highlighted.

You can use the tree controls to manipulate how the interactive tree is displayed:

show/hide the summary boxes
highlight species that are represented in the seed alignment
expand/collapse the tree or expand it to a given depth
select a sub-tree or a set of species within the tree and view them graphically or as an alignment
save a plain text representation of the tree

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Please note: for large trees this can take some time. While the tree is loading, you can safely switch away from this tab but if you browse away from the family page entirely, the tree will not be loaded.

Interactions

There are 6 interactions for this family. More...

MecA Clp_N Clp_N UVR AAA AAA

Structures

For those sequences which have a structure in the Protein DataBank, we use the mapping between UniProt, PDB and Pfam coordinate systems from the PDBe group, to allow us to map Pfam domains onto UniProt sequences and three-dimensional protein structures. The table below shows the structures on which the MecA domain has been found. There are 59 instances of this domain found in the PDB. Note that there may be multiple copies of the domain in a single PDB structure, since many structures contain multiple copies of the same protein sequence.

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Family: MecA (PF05389)

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