Bioluminescent Proteins

Question

[Sara]

Dear Friends

I am in need of downloading all bioluminescent proteins for some organisms such as human , mouse ,...

It seems that Uniprot does not contain such proteins , A friend suggested me to download from seed proteins of the Pfam database , Pfam is very confusing database for me , could anyone help me on this

Thanks and regards Sara

[Michael]

I didn't know... oh that's why I always glow in the dark ;) but human and mouse are you serious?

Answer 1

[Michael]

Your download of all human and mouse bioluminescent protein sequences will be extremely fast (0)!

Search PDB for bioluminescence http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/home.do. If you then select 'download' and select 'sequences'-tab ( http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/download/download.do?doQueryIds=getchecked&qrid=A09DD5E9 ) you can download the protein sequences as a fasta file. Given there are only 45 hits of structural entries for this term, getting 400 protein sequences of this class might not be feasible. Further any one organism might not contain more than 1, or maybe 2 of them.

This article contains a taxonomy with taxa having luminescent proteins, showing that mammals have no luminescence.

You also might find this interesting: http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~biolum/organism/ This site also has a lot of information about bio-luminescence.

Afaik, the only known source of bioluminescence are luminescent proteins (e.g. luciferase). Also, note that there is a difference between luminescence and fluorescence.

(There are no luminous "flowering" plants, birds, reptiles, amphibians or mammals.)

[Sara]

Dear Mich,I am computer engineer and very poor in biology,But as far as I know Bioluminescence occurs in marine vertebrates and invertebrates, as well as microorganisms and terrestrial animals.I don't bother about the type of organisms,I need a set of at least 400 bioluminescent proteins sequence for any two organisms for a classification task.I have one more question also.Are Luminescent Protein same as bioluminescence?when I search PDB for bioluminescence,I get 193 hits for Luminescent Protein,pls see http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/results/results.do?qrid=E789330F&tabtoshow=Current,I hope u help me

[Michael]

When you look at the second link, you will see a taxonomy with more information about organisms having developed (bio) luminescence, also that web-site contains a lot of interesting information about luminescence. I will further edit my question to suit your request.