Dataset Information

Hitchhiking behaviour in the obligatory upstream migration of amphidromous snails.

ABSTRACT: Migratory animals endure high stress during long-distance travel in order to benefit from spatio-temporally fluctuating resources, including food and shelter or from colonization of unoccupied habitats. Along with some fishes and shrimps, nerite snails in tropical to temperate freshwater systems are examples of amphidromous animals that migrate upstream for growth and reproduction after a marine larval phase. Here I report, to my knowledge, the first example of 'hitchhiking' behaviour in the obligatory migration of animals: the nerite snail Neritina asperulata appears to travel several kilometres as minute juveniles by firmly attaching to the shells of congeneric, subadult snails in streams of Melanesian Islands, presumably to increase the success rate of migration.

SUBMITTER: Kano Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2781923 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Hitchhiking behaviour in the obligatory upstream migration of amphidromous snails.

Kano Yasunori Y

Biology letters 20090501 4

Migratory animals endure high stress during long-distance travel in order to benefit from spatio-temporally fluctuating resources, including food and shelter or from colonization of unoccupied habitats. Along with some fishes and shrimps, nerite snails in tropical to temperate freshwater systems are examples of amphidromous animals that migrate upstream for growth and reproduction after a marine larval phase. Here I report, to my knowledge, the first example of 'hitchhiking' behaviour in the obl ...[more]

PMID: 19411267

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Project description:BackgroundA polypeptide chain of a protein-protein complex is said to be obligatory if it is bound to another chain throughout its functional lifetime. Such a chain might not adopt the native fold in the unbound form. A non-obligatory polypeptide chain associates with another chain and dissociates upon molecular stimulus. Although conformational changes at the interaction interface are expected, the overall 3-D structure of the non-obligatory chain is unaltered. The present study focuses on protein-protein complexes to understand further the differences between obligatory and non-obligatory interfaces.ResultsA non-obligatory chain in a complex of known 3-D structure is recognized by its stable existence with same fold in the bound and unbound forms. On the contrary, an obligatory chain is detected by its existence only in the bound form with no evidence for the native-like fold of the chain in the unbound form. Various interfacial properties of a large number of complexes of known 3-D structures thus classified are comparatively analyzed with an aim to identify structural descriptors that distinguish these two types of interfaces. We report that the interaction patterns across the interfaces of obligatory and non-obligatory components are different and contacts made by obligatory chains are predominantly non-polar. The obligatory chains have a higher number of contacts per interface (20 +/- 14 contacts per interface) than non-obligatory chains (13 +/- 6 contacts per interface). The involvement of main chain atoms is higher in the case of obligatory chains (16.9 %) compared to non-obligatory chains (11.2 %). The beta-sheet formation across the subunits is observed only among obligatory protein chains in the dataset. Apart from these, other features like residue preferences and interface area produce marginal differences and they may be considered collectively while distinguishing the two types of interfaces.ConclusionThese results can be useful in distinguishing the two types of interfaces observed in structures determined in large-scale in the structural genomics initiatives, especially for those multi-component protein assemblies for which the biochemical characterization is incomplete.

Dataset Information

Hitchhiking behaviour in the obligatory upstream migration of amphidromous snails.

Publications

Hitchhiking behaviour in the obligatory upstream migration of amphidromous snails.

Similar Datasets

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