Submitted on January 20, 2005
Revised on May 2, 2005
Accepted on May 10, 2005
Genetic association, post-translational modification and protein-protein interactions in type 2 diabetes mellitus
Amitabh Sharma, Sreenivas Chavali, Anubha Mahajan, Rubina Tabassum, Vijaya Banerjee, Nikhil Tandon, and Dwaipayan Bharadwaj
Functional Genomics Unit, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, Delhi 110 007
Corresponding Author: db{at}igib.res.in
Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus is a complex disorder with a strong genetic component. Inherited complex disease susceptibility in humans is most commonly associated with single nucleotide polymorphisms. The mechanisms by which this occurs are still poorly understood. Here, we focus on analyzing the effect of a set of disease causing missense variations of monogenetic form of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and a set of disease associated nonsynonymous variations in comparison with that of nonsynonymous variations without any experimental evidence for association with any disease. Analysis of different properties such as evolutionary conservation status, solvent accessibility, secondary structure, etc. suggests that disease causing variations are associated with extreme changes in the value of the parameters relating to evolutionary conservation and/or protein stability. Disease associated variations are rather moderately conserved and have milder effect on protein function and stability. Majority of the genes harboring these variations are clustered in or near insulin signaling network. Most of these variations are identified as potential sites for post-translational modifications; certain predictions have already reported experimental evidences. Overall, our results indicate that Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus may result from a large number of SNPs which impair modular domain function and post-translational modifications involved in signaling. Our emphasis is more on conserved corresponding residues than the variation alone. We believe that the approach of considering a stretch of peptide sequence involving a polymorphism would aid as a better method of defining its role in the manifestation of this disease. Since most of the variations associated with the disease are rare, we hypothesize that this disease is a Mosaic model of interaction between a large number of rare alleles and a small number of common alleles along with the environment, which is little contrary to the existing Common Disease Common Variants model.