Spiders produce silks which have outstanding mechanical strength and elasticity. Previous researches have shown that mechanical properties of spider silks have been diverged while spiders have been diverged to various species. Because main components of spider silks are proteins, it is valuable to find a correlation among silk sequences, evolutions, and mechanical properties. However, silk sequences were mostly regarded as a hard information to be analyzed due to their imperfectness and repetitiveness. To solve this problem, in the present work, appropriate bioinformatical tools were newly applied to systemically analyze group of silk sequences from different spider species. We found interesting results derived from graph-based sequence pattern finder that every time new types of spiders have been emerged, novel tri-peptide motifs were appeared. Motifs could be further processed to draw phylogenic tree for spider species and it greatly showed similar tendency with reported phylogenetic relationships. Motif counter was also attempted to predict mechanical properties of different silk types. This research may state that spider species and their silk proteins are evolved together according to their living environments. Therefore, performed procedures can be a platform technology for analyzing other group of protein sequences which are thought to be evolutionarily-and-functionally-related.

Bioinformatical analysis of spider silk protein sequences: Finding relation with evolution and mechanical properties

251st National Meeting (2016)

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