Summary

Ricin-type beta-trefoil lectin domain

No Pfam abstract.

InterPro entry IPR000772

Ricin is a legume lectin from the seeds of the castor bean plant, Ricinus communis. The seeds are poisonous to people, animals and insects and just one milligram of ricin can kill an adult.

Primary structure analysis has shown the presence of a similar domain in many carbohydrate-recognition proteins like plant and bacterial AB-toxins, glycosidases or proteases PUBMED:9603958, PUBMED:7664090, PUBMED:8844840. This domain, known as the ricin B lectin domain, can be present in one or more copies and has been shown in some instance to bind simple sugars, such as galactose or lactose.

The ricin B lectin domain is composed of three homologous subdomains of 40 amino acids (alpha, beta and gamma) and a linker peptide of around 15 residues (lambda). It has been proposed that the ricin B lectin domain arose by gene triplication from a primitive 40 residue galactoside-binding peptide PUBMED:3561502, PUBMED:1881882. The most characteristic, though not completely conserved, sequence feature is the presence of a Q-W pattern. Consequently, the ricin B lectin domain as also been refered as the (QxW)₃ domain and the three homologous regions as the QxW repeats PUBMED:7664090, PUBMED:8844840. A disulphide bond is also conserved in some of the QxW repeats PUBMED:7664090.

The 3D structure of the ricin B chain has shown that the three QxW repeats pack around a pseudo threefold axis that is stabilised by the lambda linker PUBMED:3561502. The ricin B lectin domain has no major segments of a helix or beta sheet but each of the QxW repeats contains an omega loop PUBMED:1881882. An idealized omega-loop is a compact, contiguous segment of polypeptide that traces a 'loop-shaped' path in three-dimensional space; the main chain resembles a Greek omega.

Clan

This family is a member of clan Trefoil (CL0066), which contains the following 14 members:

AbfB Agglutinin Botulinum_HA-17 CDtoxinA DUF569 Fascin FGF FRG1 IL1 Ins145_P3_rec Kunitz_legume MIR Ricin_B_lectin Toxin_R_bind_C

External database links

CAZY:	CBM_13
HOMSTRAD:	Ricin_B_lectin
PANDIT:	PF00652
PROSITE profile:	PS50231
SCOP:	1abr
SYSTERS:	Ricin_B_lectin

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 (99) Full (1773) NCBI (2742) Metagenomics (232)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (99) Full (1773)
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 (99) Full (1773) NCBI (2742) Metagenomics (232)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (1773)

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:

Prosite

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A

Number in seed:

99

Number in full:

1773

Average length of the domain:

122.40 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

18 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

20.73 %

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	20.5	20.5
Trusted cut-off	20.5	20.5
Noise cut-off	20.4	20.4

Model length:

125

Family (HMM) version:

15

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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Interactions

There are 5 interactions for this family. More...

Leukocidin Ricin_B_lectin Glyco_hydro_10 RIP Glycos_transf_2

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 Ricin_B_lectin domain has been found.

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Family: Ricin_B_lectin (PF00652)

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