BMC Structural Biology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Sequence and structural analysis of the Asp-box motif and Asp-box beta-propellers; a widespread propeller-type characteristic of the Vps10 domain family and several glycoside hydrolase families Esben M Quistgaard1,2 and Søren S Thirup*1 Address: 1MIND Centre, Department of Molecular Biology, University of Aarhus, Gustav Wieds Vej 10C, DK 8000 Århus C, Denmark and 2Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institute, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden Email: Esben M Quistgaard -
[email protected]; Søren S Thirup* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 13 July 2009 Received: 14 May 2009 Accepted: 13 July 2009 BMC Structural Biology 2009, 9:46 doi:10.1186/1472-6807-9-46 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6807/9/46 © 2009 Quistgaard and Thirup; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The Asp-box is a short sequence and structure motif that folds as a well-defined β- hairpin. It is present in different folds, but occurs most prominently as repeats in β-propellers. Asp- box β-propellers are known to be characteristically irregular and to occur in many medically important proteins, most of which are glycosidase enzymes, but they are otherwise not well characterized and are only rarely treated as a distinct β-propeller family. We have analyzed the sequence, structure, function and occurrence of the Asp-box and s-Asp-box -a related shorter variant, and provide a comprehensive classification and computational analysis of the Asp-box β- propeller family.