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Article history:
Received 2 February 2015
Received in revised form 26 March 2015
Accepted 27 March 2015
Available online 30 March 2015
A short partial sequence of 28 amino acids is all the information we have so far about the putative allergen
2S albumin from almond. The aim of this work was to analyze this information using mainly
bioinformatics tools, in order to verify its rightness.
Based on the results reported in the paper describing this allergen from almond, we analyzed the
original data of amino acids sequencing through available software.
The degree of homology of the almond 12 kDa protein with any other known 2S albumin appears to be
much lower than the one reported in the paper that rstly described it. In a publicly available cDNA
library we discovered an expressed sequence tag which translation generates a protein that perfectly
matches both of the sequencing outputs described in the same paper. A further analysis indicated that the
latter protein seems to belong to the vicilin superfamily rather than to the prolamin one. The fact that also
vicilins are seed storage proteins known to be highly allergenic would explain the IgE reactivity originally
observed.
Based on our observations we suggest that the IgE reactive 12 kDa protein from almond currently
known as Pru du 2S albumin is in reality the cleaved N-terminal region of a 7S vicilin like protein.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Almond2S albuminvicilin
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0321 375873; fax: +39 0321 375621.
E-mail addresses: garino@unipmn.it (C. Garino), angelo.depaolis@ispa.cnr.it
(A. De Paolis), coisson@unipmn.it (J.D. Cosson), arlorio@unipmn.it (M. Arlorio).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiolchem.2015.03.004
1476-9271/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Fig. 1. Workow of the in silico analysis performed on Pru du 2S albumin reported amino acid sequence.
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Fig. 2. ClustalW2 multialignment of the 7 Prunus dulcis ESTs (in silico translated into proteins) matching the 18 aa sequence reported in Poltronieri et al. (2002).