Tailoring the Specificity of a Plant Cystatin toward Herbivorous Insect Digestive Cysteine Proteases by Single Mutations at Positively Selected Amino Acid Sites1[OA]

From: Plant Physiology | Date: March 1, 2008| Author: Goulet, Marie-Claire; Dallaire, Cindy; Vaillancourt, Louis-Philippe; Khalf, Moustafa; Badri, Amine M; Preradov, Andreja; Duceppe, Marc-Olivier; Goulet, Charles; Cloutier, Conrad; Michaud, Dominique | Copyright information

Plant cystatins, similar to other defense proteins, include hypervariable, positively selected amino acid sites presumably impacting their biological activity. Using 29 single mutants of the eighth domain of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) multicystatin, SlCYS8, we assessed here the potential of site-directed mutagenesis at positively selected amino acid sites to generate cystatin variants with improved inhibitory potency and specificity toward herbivorous insect digestive cysteine (Cys) protea...

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