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The African clawed frog Xenopus laevis is an important model organism for studies in developmental and cell biology, including cell-signaling. However, our knowledge of X. laevis protein post-translational modifications remains scarce. Here, we used a mass spectrometry-based approach to survey the phosphoproteome of this species, compiling a list of 2636 phosphosites. We used structural information and phosphoproteomic data for 13 other species in order to predict functionally important phospho-regulatory events. We found that the degree of conservation of phosphosites across species is predictive of sites with known molecular function. In addition, we predicted kinase-protein interactions for a set of cell-cycle kinases across all species. The degree of conservation of kinase-protein interactions was found to be predictive of functionally relevant regulatory interactions. Finally, using comparative protein structure models, we find that phosphosites within structured domains tend to be located at positions with high conformational flexibility. Our analysis suggests that a small class of phosphosites occurs in positions that have the potential to regulate protein conformation.

Template-based modeling (termed also Comparative or Homology Modeling) of a protein structure is one of ubiquitous tasks of structural bioinformatics. The method can deliver model structures important for testing biological hypotheses, virtual docking and drug design. The performance of these methods is evaluated every two years during a Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiment. In this contribution we present a new automated protocol for template-based modeling, which combines computational tools recently developed in our laboratory: the database of protein domain structures (BDDB) with one dimensional and three dimensional threading applications. The protocol was tested during a CASP11 experiment.