Use case: Ceruloplasmin

Ceruloplasmin is a copper-binding glycoprotein that we propose here as an example for testing all the resources of Bioinformatic Sweeties.

We start our analysis searching the protein in DAR, using the UniProt accession number "P00450".
The protein in an enzyme associated with 1 EC number, 1 disease, 4 Reactomes and 3 reactions (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The general results of a DAR search.


Details of Ceruloplasmin annotation in terms of identifiers for pathways, reactions and diseases are reported in the "Search results" table (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Details of the "Search Results" table in a DAR search.


To retrieve more information about the disease association, we search eDGAR using the same UniProt accession
We retrieve all the possible diseases, in this case only "Aceruloplasminemia", with OMIM ID "604290".
It is a recessive disorder of iron metabolism characterized by iron accumulation in the brain as well as visceral organs. Clinical features consist of the triad of retinal degeneration, diabetes mellitus and neurological disturbances.
Among the others, the result page (Figure 3) contains the link to the UniProt webpage, containing al protein variants, and the PDB identifier for the available structure.
KEGG and Reactome pathways, GO terms, Trascription Factors and gene annotation as cytogentetic bandem or tandem repeats are reported, if available.

Figure 3: Details of the "Gene-disease association table" and "Annotation of the gene" in a eDGAR search.


We may use PhenPath to retrieve more details about this specific disease, using as input for our search the OMIM ID "604290".
In Figure 4 we see the results as a table listing all the related HPO terms along with the number of times we found each term associated with a disease,
while Figure 5 shows the Clinical Synopsis classes related to the disease in input.

Figure 4: Details of the HPO related terms in a PhenPath search.
Figure 5: Details of the "Clinical Synopsis" table in a PhenPath search.


We focus our analysis on a specific position of the protein, the residue of aspartic acid in position 544, that is known to be related with a reduced ferroxidase activity when mutated in glutamic acid (D544E).
First, we start our analysis as if we have no clue of the protein structure, submitting this protein sequence to E-pRSA to see te predicted Relative Solvent Accessibility (RSA) of position 544.
The position is predicted to be exposed and quite near an interaction sites (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Details of the results of E-pRSA.


We may confirm this prediction with ISPRED-SEQ and ISPRED4, that predict the position as a surface residue not participating in direct interface (Figure 7 and 8)

Figure 7: Details of the result of ISPRED-SEQ.
Figure 8: Details of the results of in ISPRED4.


E-SNPs&GO is the used to predict the variant pathogenicity, conferming that the variant is Benign as reported in the literature, but with a very low Reliability index (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Details of the results table in E-SNPs&GO.


Still, the activity of the enzyme is partially reduced.
We may then investigate the impact of the variant on protein stability using the INSP-SEQ and INSP3D predictors, starting from sequence or stucture, respectively.
INPS precict a stability change of -0.49 kcal/mol (Figure 10). It is not a stabilizing variants, neither it is destabiling the whole protein folding.

Figure 10: Details of the predicition in INPS.


INSP-3D precict a slightly higher stability change of -0.62 kcal/mol (Figure 11), confirming precedent results.

Figure 11: Details of the "Search Results" table in INPS-3D.


Finally, we may search in MultifacetedProtDB to retrieve information about other functionality of our protein.
It is involved in iron transport across the cell membrane. It provides Cu2+ ions for the ascorbate-mediated deaminase degradation of the heparan sulfate chains of GPC1. It may also play a role in lung development or antioxidant defense, expecially in pulmons.
The list of all the possible annotation fields is reported in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Details of the result search in MultifactedProtDB.