Computational Approach to Search for Plant Homologues of Human Heat Shock Protein

Abstract

A number of homologous human heat shock proteins (HSPs) are available in plants. Human heat shock proteins (HSPs), which are expressed at higher temperature or other stress, have chaperone activity belong to five conserved families: HSP33, HSP60, HSP70, HSP90 and HSP100. A well known bioinformatics program BLASTp reveals that each of the human HSP families possesses a number of plant homologues except HSP33. Out of the rest four families, HSP70 carries best plant homologue. The closest identified plant homologue of human HSP_7C is a protein of unknown function (NCBI Accession XP_002332067) derived from Populus trichocarpa. In silico comparative studies have showed invigorating similarity between human HSP_7C and the designated plant protein. Secondary and three-dimensional (3D) structure analysis of the predicted plant protein strongly supports its functional relationship to the class of human HSP70.