Roles of protein domains
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Roles of protein domains.

In this section you will find a brief description of the different types of roles of a multi- domain protein architecture. These have been viewed in the perspective of the advantages they confer to a protein and ultimately of the evolutionary advantages, for a species, of proteins with a multi-domain organisation.

The definition of protein domains adopted in this section is that of compactly folded structures with their own hydrophobic core.

Although the cases illustrated here are of peptide chains containing several domains most of the themes are also relevant to multi-subunit proteins which will be discussed in the chapter on quaternary structure.

Each case is illustrate with at least on example of a protein of known structure.

  1. substrate binding

  2. segragation of functions

  3. specificity or function swapping

  4. multi-functional proteins

  5. domain repeats

  6. spacer domains

  7. folding
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