A duplicated motif controls assembly of zona pellucida domain proteins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many secreted eukaryotic glycoproteins that play fundamental roles in development, hearing, immunity, and cancer polymerize into filaments and extracellular matrices through zona pellucida (ZP) domains. ZP domain proteins are synthesized as precursors containing C-terminal propeptides that are cleaved at conserved sites. However, the consequences of this processing and the mechanism by which nascent proteins assemble are unclear. By microinjection of mutated DNA constructs into growing oocytes and mammalian cell transfection, we have identified a conserved duplicated motif [EHP (external hydrophobic patch)/IHP (internal hydrophobic patch)] regulating the assembly of mouse ZP proteins. Whereas the transmembrane domain (TMD) of ZP3 can be functionally replaced by an unrelated TMD, mutations in either EHP or IHP do not hinder secretion of full-length ZP3 but completely abolish its assembly. Because mutants truncated before the TMD are not processed, we conclude that the conserved TMD of mammalian ZP proteins does not engage them in specific interactions but is essential for C-terminal processing. Cleavage of ZP precursors results in loss of the EHP, thereby activating secreted polypeptides to assemble by using the IHP within the ZP domain. Taken together, these findings suggest a general mechanism for assembly of ZP domain proteins.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".