Summary: PFEMP DBL domain

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This tab holds the annotation information that is stored in the Pfam database. As we move to using Wikipedia as our main source of annotation, the contents of this tab will be gradually replaced by the Wikipedia tab.

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PfEMP1 (Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein) has been identified as the rosetting ligand of the malaria parasite P. falciparum [1,2]. Rosetting is the adhesion of infected erythrocytes with uninfected erythrocytes in the vasculature of the infected organ, and is associated with severe malaria. PfEMP1 interacts with Complement Receptor One on uninfected erythrocytes to form rosettes [2]. The extreme variation within these proteins and the grouping of var genes implies that var gene recombination preferentially occurs within var gene groups. These groups reflect a functional diversification that has evolved to cope with the varying conditions of transmission and host immune response met by the parasite [3]. A recombination hotspot was uncovered between Duffy-binding-like (DBL) subdomains [4]. Solution of the crystal structure of the N-terminal and first DBL region of PfEMP1 from the VarO variant of the PfEMP1 protein is found to be directly implicated in rosetting as the heparin-binding site [5].

Literature references

Chen Q, Barragan A, Fernandez V, Sundstrom A, Schlichtherle M, Sahlen A, Carlson J, Datta S, Wahlgren M; , J Exp Med 1998;187:15-23.: Identification of Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1) as the rosetting ligand of the malaria parasite P. falciparum. PUBMED:9419207 EPMC:9419207
Rowe JA, Moulds JM, Newbold CI, Miller LH; , Nature 1997;388:292-295.: P. falciparum rosetting mediated by a parasite-variant erythrocyte membrane protein and complement-receptor 1. PUBMED:9230440 EPMC:9230440
Lavstsen T, Salanti A, Jensen AT, Arnot DE, Theander TG;, Malar J. 2003;2:27.: Sub-grouping of Plasmodium falciparum 3D7 var genes based on sequence analysis of coding and non-coding regions. PUBMED:14565852 EPMC:14565852
Rask TS, Hansen DA, Theander TG, Gorm Pedersen A, Lavstsen T;, PLoS Comput Biol. 2010; [Epub ahead of print]: Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 diversity in seven genomes--divide and conquer. PUBMED:20862303 EPMC:20862303
Juillerat A, Lewit-Bentley A, Guillotte M, Gangnard S, Hessel A, Baron B, Vigan-Womas I, England P, Mercereau-Puijalon O, Bentley GA;, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011;108:5243-5248.: Structure of a Plasmodium falciparum PfEMP1 rosetting domain reveals a role for the N-terminal segment in heparin-mediated rosette inhibition. PUBMED:21402930 EPMC:21402930

External database links

PANDIT:	PF03011
Pseudofam:	PF03011
SYSTERS:	PFEMP

This tab holds annotation information from the InterPro database.

InterPro entry IPR004258

Malaria is still a major cause of mortality in many areas of the world. Plasmodium falciparum causes the most severe human form of the disease and is responsible for most fatalities. Severe cases of malaria can occur when the parasite invades and then proliferates within red blood cell erythrocytes. The parasite produces many variant antigenic proteins, encoded by multigene families, which are present on the surface of the infected erythrocyte and play important roles in virulence. A crucial survival mechanism for the malaria parasite is its ability to evade the immune response by switching these variant surface antigens. The high virulence of P. falciparum relative to other malarial parasites is in large part due to the fact that in this organism many of these surface antigens mediate the binding of infected erythrocytes to the vascular endothelium (cytoadherence) and non-infected erythrocytes (rosetting). This can lead to the accumulation of infected cells in the vasculature of a variety of organs, blocking the blood flow and reducing the oxygen supply. Clinical symptoms of severe infection can include fever, progressive anaemia, multi-organ dysfunction and coma. For more information see [PUBMED:10885986].

Severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria is characterised by excessive sequestration of infected and uninfected erythrocytes in the microvasculature of the affected organ. Rosetting, the adhesion of P. falciparum-infected erythrocytes to uninfected erythrocytes is a virulent parasite phenotype associated with the occurrence of severe malaria [PUBMED:9419207]. The adhesive ligand P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1) is a rosetting protein that contains clusters of glycosaminoglycan-binding motifs.

Domain organisation

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

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Pfam Clan

This family is a member of clan DBL (CL0195), which contains the following member:

PFEMP

Alignments

We store a range of different sequence alignments for families. As well as the seed alignment from which the family is built, we provide the full alignment, generated by searching the sequence database using the family HMM. We also generate alignments using four representative proteomes (RP) sets, the NCBI sequence database, and our metagenomics sequence database. More...

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. We provide several sequence viewers and a plain-text Stockholm-format file for download.

Alignment types

We make a range of alignments for each Pfam-A family:

seed: the curated alignment from which the HMM for the family is built
full: the alignment generated by searching the sequence database using the HMM
RP15/RP35/RP55/RP75: Representative Proteomes (RPs) at 15%, 35%, 55% and 75% co-membership thresholds
NCBI: alignment generated by searching the NCBI sequence database using the family HMM
meta: alignment generated by searching the metagenomics sequence database using the family HMM

Viewing

You can see the alignments as HTML or in three different sequence viewers:

jalview: a Java applet developed at the University of Dundee. You will need Java installed before running jalview
HTML: an HTML page showing the whole alignment.Please note: full Pfam alignments can be very large. These HTML views are extremely large and often cause problems for browsers. Please use either jalview or the Pfam viewer if you have trouble viewing the HTML version
PP/Heatmap: an HTML-based representation of the alignment, coloured according to the posterior-probability (PP) values from the HMM. As for the standard HTML view, heatmap alignments can also be very large and slow to render.
Pfam viewer: an HTML-based viewer that uses DAS to retrieve alignment fragments on request

Reformatting

You can download (or view in your browser) a text representation of a Pfam alignment in various formats:

Selex
Stockholm
FASTA
MSF

You can also change the order in which sequences are listed in the alignment, change how insertions are represented, alter the characters that are used to represent gaps in sequences and, finally, choose whether to download the alignment or to view it in your browser directly.

Downloading

You may find that large alignments cause problems for the viewers and the reformatting tool, so we also provide all alignments in Stockholm format. You can download either the plain text alignment, or a gzipped version of it.

View options

We make a range of alignments for each Pfam-A family. You can see a description of each above. You can view these alignments in various ways but please note that some types of alignment are never generated while others may not be available for all families, most commonly because the alignments are too large to handle.

	Seed (41)	Full (832)	Representative proteomes				NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
	Seed (41)	Full (832)	RP15 (22)	RP35 (22)	RP55 (23)	RP75 (23)	NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
Jalview	View	View	View	View	View	View	View
HTML	View	View	View	View	View	View
PP/heatmap	₁	View	View	View	View	View
Pfam viewer	View	View

¹Cannot generate PP/Heatmap alignments for seeds; no PP data available

Key: available, not generated, — not available.

Format an alignment

	Seed (41)	Full (832)	Representative proteomes				NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
	Seed (41)	Full (832)	RP15 (22)	RP35 (22)	RP55 (23)	RP75 (23)	NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
Alignment:
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

We make all of our alignments available in Stockholm format. You can download them here as raw, plain text files or as gzip-compressed files.

	Seed (41)	Full (832)	Representative proteomes				NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
	Seed (41)	Full (832)	RP15 (22)	RP35 (22)	RP55 (23)	RP75 (23)	NCBI (881)	Meta (0)
Raw Stockholm	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download
Gzipped	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download	Download

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

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 HMMER3.

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's seed alignment. 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 alignment.

Note: You can also download the data file for the tree.

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_822 (release 6.4)

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

Griffiths-Jones SR, Bateman A

Number in seed:

41

Number in full:

832

Average length of the domain:

120.50 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

28 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

18.86 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

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

search method: hmmsearch -Z 23193494 -E 1000 --cpu 4 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	21.4	21.4
Trusted cut-off	21.4	21.4
Noise cut-off	21.3	21.2

Model length:

150

Family (HMM) version:

10

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

Sunburst
Tree

Sunburst controls

Show

This visualisation provides a simple graphical representation of the distribution of this family across species. You can find the original interactive tree in the adjacent tab. More...

This chart is a modified "sunburst" visualisation of the species tree for this family. It shows each node in the tree as a separate arc, arranged radially with the superkingdoms at the centre and the species arrayed around the outermost ring.

How the sunburst is generated

The tree is built by considering the taxonomic lineage of each sequence that has a match to this family. For each node in the resulting tree, we draw an arc in the sunburst. The radius of the arc, its distance from the root node at the centre of the sunburst, shows the taxonomic level ("superkingdom", "kingdom", etc). The length of the arc represents either the number of sequences represented at a given level, or the number of species that are found beneath the node in the tree. The weighting scheme can be changed using the sunburst controls.

In order to reduce the complexity of the representation, we reduce the number of taxonomic levels that we show. We consider only the following eight major taxonomic levels:

superkingdom
kingdom
phylum
class
order
family
genus
species

Colouring and labels

Segments of the tree are coloured approximately according to their superkingdom. For example, archeal branches are coloured with shades of orange, eukaryotes in shades of purple, etc. The colour assignments are shown under the sunburst controls. Where space allows, the name of the taxonomic level will be written on the arc itself.

As you move your mouse across the sunburst, the current node will be highlighted. In the top section of the controls panel we show a summary of the lineage of the currently highlighed node. If you pause over an arc, a tooltip will be shown, giving the name of the taxonomic level in the title and a summary of the number of sequences and species below that node in the tree.

Anomalies in the taxonomy tree

There are some situations that the sunburst tree cannot easily handle and for which we have work-arounds in place.

Missing taxonomic levels

Some species in the taxonomic tree may not have one or more of the main eight levels that we display. For example, Bos taurus is not assigned an order in the NCBI taxonomic tree. In such cases we mark the omitted level with, for example, "No order", in both the tooltip and the lineage summary.

Unmapped species names

The tree is built by looking at each sequence in the full alignment for the family. We take the name of the species given by UniProt and try to map that to the full taxonomic tree from NCBI. In some cases, the name chosen by UniProt does not map to any node in the NCBI tree, perhaps because the chosen name is listed as a synonym or a misspelling in the NCBI taxonomy.

So that these nodes are not simply omitted from the sunburst tree, we group them together in a separate branch (or segment of the sunburst tree). Since we cannot determine the lineage for these unmapped species, we show all levels between the superkingdom and the species as "uncategorised".

Sub-species

Since we reduce the species tree to only the eight main taxonomic levels, sequences that are mapped to the sub-species level in the tree would not normally be shown. Rather than leave out these species, we map them instead to their parent species. So, for example, for sequences belonging to one of the Vibrio cholerae sub-species in the NCBI taxonomy, we show them instead as belonging to the species Vibrio cholerae.

Too many species/sequences

For large species trees, you may see blank regions in the outer layers of the sunburst. These occur when there are large numbers of arcs to be drawn in a small space. If an arc is less than approximately one pixel wide, it will not be drawn and the space will be left blank. You may still be able to get some information about the species in that region by moving your mouse across the area, but since each arc will be very small, it will be difficult to accurately locate a particular species.

Loading sunburst data...

Tree controls

Hide

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

Loading...

Please note: for large trees this can take some time. While the tree is loading, you can safely switch away from this tab but if you browse away from the family page entirely, the tree will not be loaded.

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 PFEMP domain has been found. There are 4 instances of this domain found in the PDB. Note that there may be multiple copies of the domain in a single PDB structure, since many structures contain multiple copies of the same protein seqence.

Loading structure mapping...

Archea	Eukaryota
Bacteria	Other sequences
Viruses	Unclassified
Viroids	Unclassified sequence

Family: PFEMP (PF03011)

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