Summary

Zinc finger, C2H2 type

The C2H2 zinc finger is the classical zinc finger domain. The two conserved cysteines and histidines co-ordinate a zinc ion. The following pattern describes the zinc finger. #-X-C-X(1-5)-C-X3-#-X5-#-X2-H-X(3-6)-[H/C] Where X can be any amino acid, and numbers in brackets indicate the number of residues. The positions marked # are those that are important for the stable fold of the zinc finger. The final position can be either his or cys. The C2H2 zinc finger is composed of two short beta strands followed by an alpha helix. The amino terminal part of the helix binds the major groove in DNA binding zinc fingers. The accepted consensus binding sequence for Sp1 is usually defined by the asymmetric hexanucleotide core GGGCGG but this sequence does not include, among others, the GAG (=CTC) repeat that constitutes a high-affinity site for Sp1 binding to the wt1 promoter [2].

Literature references

Boehm S, Frishman D, Mewes HW; , Nucleic Acids Res 1997;25:2464-2469.: Variations of the C2H2 zinc finger motif in the yeast genome and classification of yeast zinc finger proteins. PUBMED:9171100
Marco E, Garcia-Nieto R, Gago F; , J Mol Biol 2003;328:9-32.: Assessment by molecular dynamics simulations of the structural determinants of DNA-binding specificity for transcription factor Sp1. PUBMED:12683994

InterPro entry IPR007087

C2H2-type (classical) zinc fingers (Znf) were the first class to be characterised. They contain a short beta hairpin and an alpha helix (beta/beta/alpha structure), where a single zinc atom is held in place by Cys(2)His(2) (C2H2) residues in a tetrahedral array. C2H2 Znf's can be divided into three groups based on the number and pattern of fingers: triple-C2H2 (binds single ligand), multiple-adjacent-C2H2 (binds multiple ligands), and separated paired-C2H2 PUBMED:11361095. C2H2 Znf's are the most common DNA-binding motifs found in eukaryotic transcription factors, and have also been identified in prokaryotes PUBMED:10664601. Transcription factors usually contain several Znf's (each with a conserved beta/beta/alpha structure) capable of making multiple contacts along the DNA, where the C2H2 Znf motifs recognise DNA sequences by binding to the major groove of DNA via a short alpha-helix in the Znf, the Znf spanning 3-4 bases of the DNA PUBMED:10940247. C2H2 Znf's can also bind to RNA and protein targets PUBMED:18253864.

Zinc finger (Znf) domains are relatively small protein motifs which contain multiple finger-like protrusions that make tandem contacts with their target molecule. Some of these domains bind zinc, but many do not; instead binding other metals such as iron, or no metal at all. For example, some family members form salt bridges to stabilise the finger-like folds. They were first identified as a DNA-binding motif in transcription factor TFIIIA from Xenopus laevis (African clawed frog), however they are now recognised to bind DNA, RNA, protein and/or lipid substrates PUBMED:10529348, PUBMED:15963892, PUBMED:15718139, PUBMED:17210253, PUBMED:12665246. Their binding properties depend on the amino acid sequence of the finger domains and of the linker between fingers, as well as on the higher-order structures and the number of fingers. Znf domains are often found in clusters, where fingers can have different binding specificities. There are many superfamilies of Znf motifs, varying in both sequence and structure. They display considerable versatility in binding modes, even between members of the same class (e.g. some bind DNA, others protein), suggesting that Znf motifs are stable scaffolds that have evolved specialised functions. For example, Znf-containing proteins function in gene transcription, translation, mRNA trafficking, cytoskeleton organisation, epithelial development, cell adhesion, protein folding, chromatin remodelling and zinc sensing, to name but a few PUBMED:11179890. Zinc-binding motifs are stable structures, and they rarely undergo conformational changes upon binding their target.

This entry represents the classical C2H2 type zinc finger domain.

More information about these proteins can be found at Protein of the Month: Zinc Fingers PUBMED:.

Clan

This family is a member of clan C2H2-zf (CL0361), which contains the following 5 members:

GAGA zf-BED zf-C2H2 zf-C2H2_jaz zf-U1

Gene Ontology

Cellular component	intracellular (GO:0005622)
Molecular function	zinc ion binding (GO:0008270)

External database links

HOMSTRAD:	zf-CCHH
PANDIT:	PF00096
PRINTS:	PR00048
PROSITE:	PDOC00028
SCOP:	1zaa
SYSTERS:	zf-C2H2

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 (196) Full (31268) NCBI (59818) Metagenomics (323)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (196) Full (31268)
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 (196) Full (31268) NCBI (59818) Metagenomics (323)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (31268)

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:

Boehm S

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A, Boehm S, Sonnhammer ELL, Gago F

Number in seed:

196

Number in full:

31268

Average length of the domain:

23.10 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

43 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

4.50 %

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	20.8	20.8
Trusted cut-off	20.8	20.8
Noise cut-off	20.7	20.7

Model length:

23

Family (HMM) version:

19

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
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Interactions

There are 2 interactions for this family. More...

zf-C2H2 GATA

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 MSD 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 zf-C2H2 domain has been found.

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Family: zf-C2H2 (PF00096)

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