RESEARCH ARTICLE Origin of a folded repeat protein from an intrinsically disordered ancestor Hongbo Zhu, Edgardo Sepulveda, Marcus D Hartmann, Manjunatha Kogenaru†, Astrid Ursinus, Eva Sulz, Reinhard Albrecht, Murray Coles, Jo¨ rg Martin, Andrei N Lupas* Department of Protein Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tu¨ bingen, Germany Abstract Repetitive proteins are thought to have arisen through the amplification of subdomain- sized peptides. Many of these originated in a non-repetitive context as cofactors of RNA-based replication and catalysis, and required the RNA to assume their active conformation. In search of the origins of one of the most widespread repeat protein families, the tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR), we identified several potential homologs of its repeated helical hairpin in non-repetitive proteins, including the putatively ancient ribosomal protein S20 (RPS20), which only becomes structured in the context of the ribosome. We evaluated the ability of the RPS20 hairpin to form a TPR fold by amplification and obtained structures identical to natural TPRs for variants with 2–5 point mutations per repeat. The mutations were neutral in the parent organism, suggesting that they could have been sampled in the course of evolution. TPRs could thus have plausibly arisen by amplification from an ancestral helical hairpin. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16761.001 *For correspondence: andrei.
[email protected] Introduction † Present address: Department Most present-day proteins arose through the combinatorial shuffling and differentiation of a set of of Life Sciences, Imperial College domain prototypes. In many cases, these prototypes can be traced back to the root of cellular life London, London, United and have since acted as the primary unit of protein evolution (Anantharaman et al., 2001; Kingdom Apic et al., 2001; Koonin, 2003; Kyrpides et al., 1999; Orengo and Thornton, 2005; Ponting and Competing interests: The Russell, 2002; Ranea et al., 2006).