Summary

Methyl-CpG binding domain

The Methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) binds to DNA that contains one or more symmetrically methylated CpGs [1]. DNA methylation in animals is associated with alterations in chromatin structure and silencing of gene expression. MBD has negligible non-specific affinity for DNA. In vitro foot-printing with MeCP2 showed the MBD can protect a 12 nucleotide region surrounding a methyl CpG pair [1]. MBDs are found in several Methyl-CpG binding proteins and also DNA demethylase [2].

Literature references

Nan X, Meehan RR, Bird A; , Nucleic Acids Res 1993;21:4886-4892.: Dissection of the methyl-CpG binding domain from the chromosomal protein MeCP2. PUBMED:8177735
Bhattacharya SK, Ramchandani S, Cervoni N, Szyf M; , Nature 1999;397:579-583.: A mammalian protein with specific demethylase activity for mCpG DNA. PUBMED:10050851

InterPro entry IPR001739

Methylation at CpG dinucleotide, the most common DNA modification in eukaryotes, has been correlated with gene silencing associated with various phenomena such as genomic imprinting, transposon and chromosome X inactivation, differentiation, and cancer. Effects of DNA methylation are mediated through proteins which bind to symmetrically methylated CpGs. Such proteins contain a specific domain of ~70 residues, the methyl-CpG-binding domain (MBD), which is linked to additional domains associated with chromatin, such as the bromodomain, the AT hook motif,the SET domain, or the PHD finger. MBD-containing proteins appear to act as structural proteins, which recruit a variety of histone deacetylase (HDAC) complexes and chromatin remodelling factors, leading to chromatin compaction and, consequently, to transcriptional repression. The MBD of MeCP2, MBD1, MBD2, MBD4 and BAZ2 mediates binding to DNA, in case of MeCP2, MBD1 and MBD2 preferentially to methylated CpG. In case of human MBD3 and SETDB1 the MBD has been shown to mediate protein-protein interactions PUBMED:12529184, PUBMED:12787239.

The MBD folds into an alpha/beta sandwich structure comprising a layer of twisted beta sheet, backed by another layer formed by the alpha1 helix and a hairpin loop at the C terminus. These layers are both amphipathic, with the alpha1 helix and the beta sheet lying parallel and the hydrophobic faces tightly packed against each other. The beta sheet is composed of two long inner strands (beta2 and beta3) sandwiched by two shorter outer strands (beta1 and beta4) PUBMED:11371345.

Clan

This family is a member of clan MBD-like (CL0081), which contains the following 3 members:

AP2 Integrase_DNA MBD

Gene Ontology

Cellular component	nucleus (GO:0005634)
Molecular function	DNA binding (GO:0003677)

External database links

HOMSTRAD:	MBD
PANDIT:	PF01429
SCOP:	1qk9
SYSTERS:	MBD

Domain organisation

Below is a listing of the unique domain organisations or architectures in which this domain is found. More...

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Alignments

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. You can use a sequence viewer to look at either the seed or full alignment for the family, or you can look at a plain text version of the sequence in a variety of different formats. More...

View options

Alignment:	Seed (16) Full (408) NCBI (803) Metagenomics (15)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (16) Full (408)
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

Very large alignments can often cause problems for the formatting tool above. If you find that downloading or viewing a large alignment is problematic, you can also download a gzip-compressed, Stockholm-format file containing the seed or full alignment for this family.

You can also download a FASTA format file containing the full-length sequences for all sequences in the full alignment.

The main seed and full alignments are generated using sequences from the UniProt sequence database. However, we also generate alignments using sequences from the NCBI sequence database and the "metaseq" metagenomics dataset.

You can view alignments from these two additional datasets using the form above, or you can download alignments of NCBI or metagenomics sequences, as gzip-compressed files.

Pfam alignments:	Seed (16) Full (408) NCBI (803) Metagenomics (15)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (408)

External links

MyHits provides a collection of tools to handle multiple sequence alignments. For example, one can refine a seed alignment (sequence addition or removal, re-alignment or manual edition) and then search databases for remote homologs using HMMER2.

HMM logo

HMM logos is one way of visualising profile HMMs. Logos provide a quick overview of the properties of an HMM in a graphical form. You can see a more detailed description of HMM logos and find out how you can interpret them here. More...

Trees

This page displays the phylogenetic tree for this family. We use FastTree to calculate neighbour join trees with a local bootstrap based on 100 resamples (shown next to the tree nodes). FastTree calculates approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from our seed or full alignments.

Note: You can also download the data files for the seed, full, NCBI or metagenomics trees.

Curation and family details

This section shows the detailed information about the Pfam family. You can see the definitions of many of the terms in this section in the glossary and a fuller explanation of the scoring system that we use in the scores section of the help pages.

Curation

Seed source:

Bateman A

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A

Number in seed:

16

Number in full:

408

Average length of the domain:

77.50 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

22 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

11.01 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

build method: hmmbuild -o /dev/null HMM SEED

search method: hmmsearch -Z 9421015 -E 1000 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	20.7	20.7
Trusted cut-off	20.7	20.7
Noise cut-off	20.6	20.6

Model length:

77

Family (HMM) version:

12

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

Tree controls

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The tree shows the occurrence of this domain across different species. More...

Species trees

We show the species tree in one of two ways. For smaller trees we try to show an interactive representation, which allows you to select specific nodes in the tree and view them as an alignment or as a set of Pfam domain graphics.

Unfortunately we have found that there are problems viewing the interactive tree when the it becomes larger than a certain limit. Furthermore, we have found that Internet Explorer can become unresponsive when viewing some trees, regardless of their size. We therefore show a text representation of the species tree when the size is above a certain limit or if you are using Internet Explorer to view the site.

If you are using IE you can still load the interactive tree by clicking the "Generate interactive tree" button, but please be aware of the potential problems that the interactive species tree can cause.

Interactive tree

For all of the domain matches in a full alignment, we count the number that are found on all sequences in the alignment. This total is shown in the purple box.

We also count the number of unique sequences on which each domain is found, which is shown in green. Note that a domain may appear multiple times on the same sequence, leading to the difference between these two numbers.

Finally, we group sequences from the same organism according to the NCBI code that is assigned by UniProt, allowing us to count the number of distinct sequences on which the domain is found. This value is shown in the pink boxes.

We use the NCBI species tree to group organisms according to their taxonomy and this forms the structure of the displayed tree. Note that in some cases the trees are too large (have too many nodes) to allow us to build an interactive tree, but in most cases you can still view the tree in a plain text, non-interactive representation. Those species which are represented in the seed alignment for this domain are highlighted.

You can use the tree controls to manipulate how the interactive tree is displayed:

show/hide the summary boxes
highlight species that are represented in the seed alignment
expand/collapse the tree or expand it to a given depth
select a sub-tree or a set of species within the tree and view them graphically or as an alignment
save a plain text representation of the tree

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Structures

For those sequences which have a structure in the Protein DataBank, we use the mapping between UniProt, PDB and Pfam coordinate systems from the PDBe group, to allow us to map Pfam domains onto UniProt sequences and three-dimensional protein structures. The table below shows the structures on which the MBD domain has been found.

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Family: MBD (PF01429)

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