SUMOylation

Dorawest22 Dec, 2023Health

The Small Ubiquitin-related Modifier (SUMO) is a family of small proteins, each composed of approximately 100 amino acids (AAs). Notably, the three-dimensional structure reveals a striking resemblance between SUMO and ubiquitin, despite sharing less than 20% identity in their AA sequences and exhibiting significant differences in overall surface-charge distribution. The human genome encodes five SUMO proteins, namely SUMO1 through SUMO5. The similarity between SUMO1 and SUMO2, as well as SUMO3, is approximately 50%, while the similarity between SUMO1 and SUMO5 is approximately 88%. On the other hand, SUMO2 and SUMO3 exhibits a high degree of similarity (97%, differing only in three N-terminal residues) and is often referred to as SUMO-2/3.