Structural highlights
Function
[WAC_BPT4] Chaperone responsible for attachment of long tail fibers to virus particle. Forms the fibrous structure on the neck of the virion called whiskers. During phage assembly, 6 fibritin molecules attach to each virion neck through their N-terminal domains, to form a collar with six fibers ('whiskers').
Evolutionary Conservation
Check, as determined by ConSurfDB. You may read the explanation of the method and the full data available from ConSurf.
Publication Abstract from PubMed
Fibritin is a fibrous protein that forms "whiskers" attached to the neck of bacteriophage T4. Whiskers interact with the long tail fibers regulating the assembly and infectivity of the virus. The fibritin trimer includes the N-terminal domain responsible for attachment to the phage particle and for the collar formation, the central domain forming a 500 A long segmented coiled-coil structure, and the C-terminal "foldon" domain. We have designed a "mini" fibritin with most of the coiled-coil domain deleted, and solved its crystal structure. The non-helical N-terminal part represents a new protein fold that tightly interacts with the coiled-coil segment forming a single domain, as revealed by calorimetry. The analysis of the crystal structure and earlier electron microscopy data on the collar-whisker complex suggests the necessity of other proteins to participate in the collar formation. Crystal structure determination of the N-terminal domain of fibritin is the first step towards elucidating the detailed structure and assembly mechanism of the collar-whisker complex.
Design and crystal structure of bacteriophage T4 mini-fibritin NCCF.,Boudko SP, Strelkov SV, Engel J, Stetefeld J J Mol Biol. 2004 Jun 11;339(4):927-35. PMID:15165860[1]
From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
References
- ↑ Boudko SP, Strelkov SV, Engel J, Stetefeld J. Design and crystal structure of bacteriophage T4 mini-fibritin NCCF. J Mol Biol. 2004 Jun 11;339(4):927-35. PMID:15165860 doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2004.04.001
