Summary

STAT protein, DNA binding domain

STAT proteins (Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription) are a family of transcription factors that are specifically activated to regulate gene transcription when cells encounter cytokines and growth factors. This family represents the DNA binding domain of STAT, which has an ig-like fold. STAT proteins also include an SH2 domain PF00017.

Literature references

Becker S, Groner B, Muller CW; , Nature 1998;394:145-151.: Three-dimensional structure of the Stat3beta homodimer bound to DNA. PUBMED:9671298
Vinkemeier U, Moarefi I, Darnell JE Jr, Kuriyan J; , Science 1998;279:1048-1052.: Structure of the amino-terminal protein interaction domain of STAT-4. PUBMED:9461439

InterPro entry IPR013801

The STAT protein (Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription) family contains transcription factors that are specifically activated to regulate gene transcription when cells encounter cytokines and growth factors, hence they act as signal transducers in the cytoplasm and transcription activators in the nucleus PUBMED:12039028. Binding of these factors to cell-surface receptors leads to receptor autophosphorylation at a tyrosine, the phosphotyrosine being recognised by the STAT SH2 domain, which mediates the recruitment of STAT proteins from the cytosol and their association with the activated receptor. The STAT proteins are then activated by phosphorylation via members of the JAK family of protein kinases, causing them to dimerise and translocated to the nucleus, where they bind to specific promoter sequences in target genes. In mammals, STATs comprise a family of seven structurally and functionally related proteins: Stat1, Stat2, Stat3, Stat4, Stat5a and Stat5b, Stat6. STAT proteins play a critical role in regulating innate and acquired host immune responses. Dysregulation of at least two STAT signalling cascades (i.e. Stat3 and Stat5) is associated with cellular transformation.

Signalling through the JAK/STAT pathway is initiated when a cytokine binds to its corresponding receptor. This leads to conformational changes in the cytoplasmic portion of the receptor, initiating activation of receptor associated members of the JAK family of kinases. The JAKs, in turn, mediate phosphorylation at the specific receptor tyrosine residues, which then serve as docking sites for STATs and other signalling molecules. Once recruited to the receptor, STATs also become phosphorylated by JAKs, on a single tyrosine residue. Activated STATs dissociate from the receptor, dimerise, translocate to the nucleus and bind to members of the GAS (gamma activated site) family of enhancers.

The seven STAT proteins identified in mammals range in size from 750 and 850 amino acids. The chromosomal distribution of these STATs, as well as the identification of STATs in more primitive eukaryotes, suggest that this family arose from a single primordial gene. STATs share structurally and functionally conserved domains including: an N-terminal domain that strengthens interactions between STAT dimers on adjacent DNA-binding sites; a coiled-coil STAT domain that is implicated in protein-protein interactions; a DNA-binding domain with an immunoglobulin-like fold similar to p53 tumour suppressor protein; an EF-hand-like linker domain connecting the DNA-binding and SH2 domains; an SH2 domain () that acts as a phosphorylation-dependent switch to control receptor recognition and DNA-binding; and a C-terminal transactivation domain PUBMED:9630226. The crystal structure of the N-terminus of Stat4 reveals a dimer. The interface of this dimer is formed by a ring-shaped element consisting of five short helices. Several studies suggest that this N-terminal dimerisation promotes cooperativity of binding to tandem GAS elements and with the transcriptional coactivator CBP/p300.

This entry represents the DNA-binding domain, which has an immunoglobulin-like structural fold.

Clan

This family is a member of clan P53-like (CL0073), which contains the following 6 members:

NDT80_PhoG P53 RHD Runt STAT_bind T-box

Gene Ontology

Cellular component	nucleus (GO:0005634)
Molecular function	signal transducer activity (GO:0004871)
Molecular function	transcription factor activity (GO:0003700)
Biological process	signal transduction (GO:0007165)
Biological process	regulation of transcription, DNA-dependent (GO:0006355)

External database links

PANDIT:	PF02864
SCOP:	1bgf
SYSTERS:	STAT_bind

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 (9) Full (266) NCBI (628) Metagenomics (4)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (9) Full (266)
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 (9) Full (266) NCBI (628) Metagenomics (4)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (266)

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:

Pfam-B_856 (release 3.0)

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A, Griffiths-Jones SR

Number in seed:

9

Number in full:

266

Average length of the domain:

219.20 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

40 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

33.12 %

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	20.2	20.2
Trusted cut-off	24.2	23.7
Noise cut-off	16.6	19.1

Model length:

254

Family (HMM) version:

8

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 3 interactions for this family. More...

SH2 STAT_bind STAT_alpha

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 STAT_bind domain has been found.

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Family: STAT_bind (PF02864)

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