Characterization and sequence analysis of the proteins involved in CaCO3 biomineralization

Abstract:
All types of biomineralization share a remarkable property: they are organo-mineral assemblages where the dominant mineral is closely associated to a minor organic matrix. The organic matrix is mainly rich in proteins, the key components of mineral formation. Despite this evidence, fundamental questions still remain in order to understand the mechanisms of protein-mineral interactions and whether there was an ancestral metazoan biomineralization core toolkit shared by all the extant animal lineages.

In our work we decided to focus on the study of the secreted proteins that regulate calcium carbonate structures in metazoans.To elucidate this process an automated selection and analysis of all described and putative calcifying proteins was carried out in order to characterize new motifs, domains, establish new functional relations and integrate this data into a database. Results of this approach will be presented and explained.

Future work on the prediction of biomineralization genes within a genome will also be presented as well as a brief overview of some experimental approaches used to identify calcifying proteins and that
can be useful to validate gene finding/prediction models.