arfB Family assigned · low

H37Rv Rv0900 · MTBC0 mtbc0_000954 · 50 aa · 1007019–1007171 (+) · RefSeq NP_215415.1

Annotation: from legacy to revised

Legacy (H37Rv / Mycobrowser)membrane protein
MTBC0 PGAP re-annotationhypothetical protein
Revised (this work)Small membrane protein that post-transcriptionally regulates expression of the major outer-membrane porin OmpATb. RefSeq leaves it 'membrane protein'. Rv0900 lies in an operon with ompATb (Rv0899) and Rv0901; mutations in Rv0900/Rv0901 strongly alter OmpATb expression, demonstrating a regulatory role (Veyron-Churlet 2011).

Curated reference (UniProt)

UniProt P9WJG7 SwissProt · reviewed · Evidence at transcript level
UniProt nameUncharacterized membrane protein ArfB
Curated functionRequired for wild-type expression of ArfA and ammonia secretion, not however part of an ammonia transporter.

UniProt still lists this protein as Uncharacterized membrane protein ArfB; the revised annotation above is ahead of the current UniProt record.

Functional vocabulary (eggNOG-mapper, orthology transfer)

Preferred namearfB
Orthologous group2AYBF
KEGG orthology K16192
Gene Ontology (9) GO:0008150, GO:0040007, GO:0044110, GO:0044116, GO:0044117, GO:0044119, GO:0044403, GO:0044419, GO:0051704

Orthology-based transfer (eggNOG 5.0.2, diamond). EC/KO/GO/CAZy are computed annotations, not manual curation; cross-check against the primary literature before treating a specific reaction as established.

Conservation & selection (intra-MTBC, 145 209 strains)

pN/pS n/a
Polymorphic sites (≥ 0.1% of strains) 0 synonymous, 1 missense, 0 nonsense, 0 frameshift

pN/pS from segregating SNPs (singletons removed) normalised by possible sites. Low pN/pS = purifying selection (a strong signal that a "hypothetical" is a real, constrained gene). A high pN/pS is ambiguous: relaxed constraint or positive selection (drug resistance, antigenic variation) inflate it; e.g. rpoB/katG/pncA score high here for resistance, not loss of function. A clonal disruption (one allele over a clade) suggests lineage pseudogenisation; a convergent one (many independent alleles) is typical of resistance loss-of-function.

Domains (Pfam, hmmscan --cut_ga)

No Pfam-A domain above the gathering threshold (or not yet scanned).

Functional interaction network (STRING v12, guilt-by-association)

Closest characterised functional partner: arfC (membrane protein), high confidence from genomic context alone (score 885 excluding text-mining).

PartnerProductScoreNo text-miningChannels (≥400)
Rv0901 arfC membrane protein 984 885 ctx neighborhood:882 textmining:870
Rv0899 arfA peptidoglycan-binding protein ArfA 969 777 ctx neighborhood:777 textmining:870
Rv0898c hyp hypothetical protein 570 570 ctx neighborhood:570
Rv0897c oxidoreductase 488 488 ctx neighborhood:485
Rv1027c kdpE transcriptional regulator KdpE 433 47 textmining:430
Rv1031 kdpC potassium-transporting ATPase subunit C 646 46 textmining:645
Rv1028A kdpF membrane protein KdpF 809 41 textmining:809

STRING combines evidence channels (neighborhood, fusion, cooccurrence, coexpression, experimental, database, text-mining) into a 0–1000 score. The ctx badge marks edges carried by the genomic-context channels (conserved neighborhood, fusion, phylogenetic co-occurrence), which are independent of orthology and structure and the strongest signal for an unknown gene. The no text-mining column recomputes the score from data alone, so a link that does not depend on the literature is visible. Association is a function hypothesis, not proof: corroborate with the operon context and the primary literature before assigning a function.

Evidence

  • Small membrane protein; ompATb-Rv0900-Rv0901 operon; regulates OmpATb post-transcriptionally (Veyron-Churlet 2011, PMID 21802366)
  • Curated from the literature crible (project 'Still unknown gene function', 2026-06-09)

Sources

  • Ancestral sequence & coordinates: Harrison LB et al. (2024), An imputed ancestral reference genome for the MTBC, doi:10.1101/2023.09.07.556366
  • Product annotation: NCBI PGAP on MTBC0; legacy from H37Rv NC_000962.3 (RefSeq NP_215415.1)
  • Domains: Pfam-A via hmmscan --cut_ga — none above threshold
  • Sequence-level signal: ESM Atlas (EvolutionaryScale × BioHub) — exploratory
  • Controlled vocabulary: eggNOG-mapper 2.1.12 (Cantalapiedra et al. 2021, doi:10.1093/molbev/msab293), eggNOG 5.0 DB (Huerta-Cepas et al. 2019) — OG 2AYBF
  • Curated reference: UniProt P9WJG7 (SwissProt, reviewed; Evidence at transcript level)
  • Intra-MTBC selection: pN/pS and disruption from SPDI variants of 145 209 MTBC strains (this work, local collection vs H37Rv NC_000962.3)
  • Interaction network: STRING v12.0 (Szklarczyk et al. 2023, doi:10.1093/nar/gkac1000), taxon 83332, CC-BY 4.0 — 7 functional partner(s); context anchor arfC
  • Primary literature: Veyron-Churlet R, Brust B, Kremer L, Blanc-Potard AB (2011). Expression of OmpATb is dependent on small membrane proteins in Mycobacterium bovis BCG Tuberculosis (Edinb) 91(6):544-8. doi:10.1016/j.tube.2011.06.008 PMID:21802366

Ancestral MTBC0 protein sequence

>mtbc0_000954|Rv0900|arfB
MDFVIQWSCYLLAFLGGSAVAWVVVTLSIKRASRDEGAAEAPSAAETGAQ