Thirty-plus functional families from a single motif

It is now possible to identify over 30 functional subfamilies among the WD- repeat-containing proteins found in the completed genomes. The majority of these subfamilies have at least one member for which experimental data allo w assignment to a cellular pathway or process. Half of the 63 WD-repeat-con taining proteins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. half of the 70 in Caenorhabdi tis elegans. and a third of the 100 plus predicted in Drosophila can be ass igned to 23 of these functional subfamilies. Perhaps indicative of the futu re, 33 WD-repeat-containing proteins from the partial genome of Arabidopsis thaliana can now be assigned to 18 of these subfamilies. These assignments have been made possible by combining traditional sequence similarity with an implied common beta propeller structural context to obtain measures of p rotein-protein surface similarity. The beta propeller structural context is represented in the form of a Hidden Markov Model. The procedure is complet ely automated.