Rv2269c Family assigned · low

H37Rv Rv2269c · MTBC0 mtbc0_002411 · 110 aa · 2570394–2570726 MTBC0 (-) · RefSeq NP_216785.1

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Annotation: from legacy to revised

Legacy (H37Rv / Mycobrowser)hypothetical protein
MTBC0 PGAP re-annotationhypothetical protein
Revised (this work)Gene of the sulfomenaquinone (SMK) biosynthetic operon. RefSeq leaves it of unknown function. Rv2269c is part of the operon (with the sulfotransferase stf3 and the cytochrome P450 cyp128) producing SMK, an MTBC-specific virulence-modulating menaquinone derivative; rv2269c shows promoter activity, while cyp128 and stf3 are sufficient for SMK biosynthesis (Sogi 2016). Specific role unfixed.
Functional category (TubercuList)conserved hypotheticals

In the literature (TB corpus sweep) 1 publication

Found under: H37Rv (1).

1 TB publication mentions this gene. 1 publication(s) mention this gene (title/abstract), verified against the text. The atlas states the function; these are the primary sources that discuss it.

PublicationDate
Biosynthesis and Regulation of Sulfomenaquinone, a Metabolite Associated with Virulence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. doi:10.1021/acsinfecdis.6b00106 2016
1 record returned by the alias sweep

Searched as: Rv2269c, Mb2292c — each in conjunction with a mycobacterial context term. Swept 2026-09-07.

PublicationJournalYear
Biosynthesis and Regulation of Sulfomenaquinone, a Metabolite Associated with Virulence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. doi:10.1021/acsinfecdis.6b00106 ACS Infect Dis 2016

Title+abstract index only: a paper that names this gene solely in its body text, a figure legend or a supplement is invisible here. That is why this list sits beside the curated layer rather than replacing it - Rv0007's characterisation, found by a full-text sweep, returns zero in this one. Absence from this list is not absence from the literature. Source: PubMed E-utilities sweep (esearch + esummary), every alias of the gene searched in conjunction with a mycobacterial context term; ambiguous common-word aliases excluded. phase198, 2026-09-06.

This layer CITES the literature, it does not change the verdict or the function. A gene may be heavily studied (as an antigen, a resistance determinant, a drug target) while its molecular function is settled elsewhere in the fiche. This distinguishes a gene that is dark because nobody has looked from one that is dark despite having been studied. Source: PubMed (whole), MULTI-ALIAS sweep: H37Rv locus tag AND every ortholog identifier (M. bovis Mb…, M. marinum MMAR_…, M. smegmatis MSMEG_…, M. leprae ML…, M. abscessus MAB_…), each hit VERIFIED against the abstract text (word-boundary regex). phase73/phase75, 2026-07-13.

Intrinsic disorder (sequence + structure) highly disordered

Predicted disorder100% of residues (metapredict) · mean AlphaFold pLDDT 31.2
Disordered regions1 IDR(s), longest 110 aa [0-110]

carries a substantial disordered region (110/110 residues); disorder is a property, not a function

A property (biophysics), not a function. No LLPS/condensate claim is made from disorder alone. Verdict unchanged. Source: metapredict v3 (Emenecker/Holehouse) per-residue disorder + AlphaFold mean pLDDT (annotation_mtbc P16.13).

Phenotype-driven functional lead (hypothesis) priority 6.0

required for fitness in vivo (virulence / persistence factor).

Corroborating evidenceconserved / under constraint intra-MTBC; STRING-coupled to cyp128 (cytochrome P450 Cyp128); co-transcribed with cyp128

This locus is a "hypothetical" with a conditional Tn-seq phenotype. The statement above is a working hypothesis for its functional context, synthesised from the phenotype pattern and the corroborating layers on this page (conservation, STRING coupling, operon, regulon, localisation, structure) — a prioritised requalification candidate to validate, not an established function.

CRISPRi vulnerability

Vulnerability index 0.93 (95% CI -0.66 to 3.91). A more negative index = more vulnerable to knockdown (better drug-target quality); indicative threshold VI ≤ -6 = highly vulnerable.

Quantitative CRISPRi knockdown, graded (finer than binary Tn-seq essentiality). Source: CRISPRi vulnerability index (Bosch 2021, supplementary Table S2 'mmc3.xlsx', bulk import via Europe PMC -- supersedes the per-gene pebble.rockefeller.edu scrape of phase46_crispri_vulnerability.py).

Caveat on this estimate. Bosch et al. flag this gene's vulnerability estimate as NOT certain, and here that call has a mechanical cause visible in the library itself: every guide targeting this gene is >=21 nt (str_span=0.140 on a 0-1 scale, near the genome floor), and guide repression strength saturates from 21 nt on -- so the library never sampled a partial knockdown for this gene, only the near-maximal repression plateau. The dose-response fit (and this VI) is therefore essentially unconstrained by data, not merely uncertain -- a limitation of the CRISPRi library design for the non-essential class (Bosch et al. 2021), not a defect in this specific measurement. n_guides=5 is descriptive only and does not predict this. Do not cite this VI as a standalone vulnerability claim.

Legacy record & comparison (Mycobrowser) ahead of Mycobrowser

Mycobrowser classes this locus among conserved hypotheticals; the atlas now assigns a functional handle (curated function (UniProt)). Mycobrowser is no longer maintained, so its EC numbers predate recent nomenclature revisions (e.g. the 2018 EC 7 "translocase" class) — most EC differences are re-numberings of the same enzyme, not conflicts.

Orthologues (reciprocal best hits across mycobacteria)

M. bovis Mb2292c · 99.1% identity
M. orygis RJtmp_002345 · 99.1% identity

Reciprocal-best-hit orthologues (DIAMOND) against the Mycobrowser reference proteomes. A missing species is informative: e.g. a gene absent from M. leprae was likely lost in its reductive genome evolution. Locus tags link to Mycobrowser.

Curated reference (UniProt)

UniProt P9WLF9 SwissProt · reviewed · Evidence at transcript level
UniProt nameUncharacterized protein Rv2269c
Curated functionMay play a regulatory role in sulfomenaquinone (SMK) biosynthesis. Not essential for SMK biosynthesis.

As checked on 2026-09-23, UniProt listed this protein as Uncharacterized protein Rv2269c; the revised annotation above goes beyond that record. UniProt may have been recurated since: check the live entry.

Conservation & selection (intra-MTBC, 142 601 strains, snapshot of 2026-09-29)

pN/pS 0.564 · quasi-invariant (5 sites), pN/pS underpowered
Polymorphic sites (≥ 0.1% of strains) 2 synonymous, 3 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.

Outgroup conservation (beyond the MTBC) MTBC-specific

M. canettii dN/dS (deep-divergence selection) undefined (dS = 0) (low power) · 2 consensus substitution(s)
low power (2 canettii-consensus substitution(s)); present in M. canettii but dN/dS not reliable
Limitation: dN/dS mixes fixed canettii-H37Rv divergence with intra-canettii polymorphism, and is not polarised (the per-gene repolarisation is not viable: 79 % of the consensus SPDI lie outside the polarised table).
Genus-wide presence (~53 non-MTBC Mycobacterium) present in 0/53 (0%) · 0/4 closest MTBAP relatives
absent from ALL 53 non-MTBC Mycobacterium genomes tested (incl. the closest MTBAP relatives) — a candidate MTBC-specific genetic innovation / host-adaptation factor (confirm by synteny; rule out a short/low-complexity ORF and extreme divergence)
Phylostratum (deepest detected homolog) MTBC-specific → Mycobacterium → Mycobacteriaceae → Corynebacteriales → Actinomycetia → Bacteria

absent from the whole genus and from all outgroups tested — a candidate MTBC-specific innovation (confirm by synteny; rule out detection failure for short/divergent ORFs)

Two orthogonal outgroup signals. M. canettii (the immediate outgroup) gives a deep-divergence dN/dS (a low value confirms a constrained, real gene; shown as confident only at ≥8 substitutions, else flagged low-power). Genus-wide presence/absence (tblastn vs assembled non-MTBC genomes) places the gene on the ancient-core ↔ MTBC-specific axis: a gene absent even from the closest MTBAP relatives is a candidate MTBC-specific innovation (possible host-adaptation factor, to confirm by synteny). The phylostratum extends that axis outside the genus (tblastn vs 13 reference genomes spanning Mycobacteriaceae → Corynebacteriales → Actinomycetia → outside the phylum): it is the deepest clade in which a homolog is still detected, i.e. a proxy for gene age. Read it with the null model in mind: a shallow (young) stratum can also reflect homology-detection failure for short or fast-evolving ORFs, so it is a descriptive axis, not a proof of novelty.

Essentiality (transposon mutagenesis)

DeJesus 2017 callNE · non-essential
What the call meansnon-essential
TA sites (Himar1) 12 in the ORF — 0 in the essential state, 0 growth-defect, 12 non-essential, 0 growth-advantage. Saturation 0.833, mean read count 82.2. A region of the protein devoid of TA sites is invisible to this assay: nothing can be inferred about it, in either direction.
All 12 sites lie in this ORF alone (no overlapping CDS shares any), so the call is attributable to this gene.

Genome-wide Himar1 transposon essentiality in H37Rv (DeJesus 2017). An essential call (ES/ESD/GD) is strong, independent evidence that a "hypothetical" locus encodes a functional, selectively required gene — orthogonal to intra-species conservation.

Mutant phenotypes (conditional Tn-seq, MtbTnDB) in-vivo phenotype

Conditionlog2FCqEffect
fitness in mouse infection, day 10 (in vivo) -6.050.0 required

Conditional fitness of transposon-disruption mutants across 1 significant condition(s) (|log2FC|≥1, q≤0.05), from the standardized MtbTnDB compendium. A negative log2FC means the mutant is depleted — the gene contributes to fitness in that condition. An in-vivo defect for a "hypothetical" is strong evidence it matters for infection, even without a known molecular function. Disruption (Tn insertion), not a clean deletion; genetic-interaction screens excluded.

Proteomics (mass spectrometry) not detected

Not detected in the mass-spectrometry datasets integrated by PaxDb. This is not evidence of absence, and this atlas can say which bias dominates, because it measured it on its own 482 undetected proteins. Size is the main factor: undetected proteins have a median length of 145 aa against 295 aa for detected ones, and 25.3 % of them are shorter than 100 aa against 6.0 %. Predicted localisation matters far less than usually assumed: detection rates are 89.3 % for globular, 84.9 % for transmembrane, 88.0 % for lipoproteins and 77.8 % for signal-peptide proteins — so a short protein is under-sampled whatever its predicted compartment, and hydrophobicity alone is a weak excuse. Condition-specific expression and few tryptic peptides (PE/PPE repeats) add to this.

Predicted localisation (DeepTMHMM + lipobox) no export signal, no TM helix

Predictionno signal peptide, no TM helix (DeepTMHMM class GLOB)
DeepTMHMM classGLOB

A verified absence of signals, which is not a compartment. No Sec/Tat signal peptide, no transmembrane helix and no lipobox were found on this sequence. The predictor reports topology and export signals; it does not measure where the protein ends up, so this page draws no cytoplasmic conclusion from it. In M. tuberculosis that reservation is not theoretical: the 12 Esx paralogues of this atlas — EsxA/ESAT-6 and EsxB/CFP-10 among them, the best-established secreted proteins of the species — carry this very call, because substrates of the type VII (ESX) secretion system leave no recognisable signal. « Secreted » and « no signal peptide » are true together here.

Transmembrane topology and signal peptide from DeepTMHMM (deep-learning reference predictor); lipoproteins from a (myco)bacterial lipobox motif. A sequence-based prediction of subcellular context.

Physico-chemical properties (computed, ProtParam)

Length110 aa
Molecular weight11.7 kDa
Theoretical pI8.58
GRAVY-0.142 (hydrophilic)
Aliphatic index86.9
Aromaticity0.027
Instability index44.3 (unstable)

Computed from the ancestral MTBC0 sequence with the ExPASy ProtParam method (Biopython). Descriptive biophysical context: a positive GRAVY flags a hydrophobic (often membrane) protein, a high instability index (>40) predicts a short in-vitro half-life, an extreme pI hints at compartment or binding partner.

Domains (Pfam, hmmscan --cut_ga)

No Pfam-A domain above the gathering threshold (hmmscan --cut_ga scan completed).

3D structure (interactive — Mol*/pdbe-molstar)

No experimental structure is deposited for this gene: showing the AlphaFold DB predicted model (mean pLDDT 31.2, very low), coloured by per-residue confidence (dark blue = very high, orange/red = low — treat low-confidence regions as unreliable, especially termini and loops). Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Genomic context (neighbours & predicted operon) operon of 3

Upstream (5' on genome)cyp128 (- strand, 12 bp gap)
Downstream (3' on genome)lppN (+ strand, 76 bp gap)
Predicted operon Rv2267c · cyp128 · Rv2269c

Neighbours from the H37Rv annotation (- strand). The operon is predicted by co-directional intergenic distance (same strand, gaps ≤50 bp) — a transcription-unit hypothesis, not a mapped TSS. For a "hypothetical", co-transcription with a characterised operon is a concrete functional lead (complements the STRING neighborhood channel below).

Published operon evidence (two independent sources)

Roback 2007 (logistic regression: distance + expression correlation, 474 microarrays) no multi-gene operon predicted (singleton) — disagrees with the distance heuristic above

Two independent published operon maps, cited alongside the distance heuristic above: an association corroborating or contradicting the heuristic, never proof of shared function. REMap's RNA-seq coverage continuity is the most direct of the three signals; Roback's logistic regression and the intergenic-distance heuristic are statistical proxies.

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

Explore full network →

Node colour = verdict, dashed = still uncharacterised; edge colour = evidence (green experimental, orange genomic-context, grey co-expression), width ∝ score. Click a partner to open its page; "Explore full network" to walk the graph.

Closest characterised functional partner: cyp128 (cytochrome P450 Cyp128), high confidence (score 767, all STRING channels except text-mining; the partner is chosen on its genomic-context evidence).

All 4 partner(s) at medium confidence are shown. None rests on an interaction measured in M. tuberculosis itself.

PartnerProductScoreNo text-miningChannels (≥400)
Rv2268c cyp128 cytochrome P450 Cyp128 968 767 ctx neighborhood:765 textmining:870
Rv2267c stf3 hypothetical protein 968 766 ctx neighborhood:765 textmining:870
Rv2270 lppN lipoprotein LppN 573 573 ctx neighborhood:561
Rv2266 cyp124 cytochrome P450 Cyp124 546 50 textmining:542

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.

Where the experimental evidence comes from, and why it matters here. STRING's experimental channel fuses interactions measured in M. tuberculosis with interactions measured in another organism and transferred to this pair by orthology. The two are not equivalent for this atlas, whose standing rule is that better studied elsewhere is not a function established in M. tuberculosis. Measured on the served network: of the 38 229 partner pairs shown across the atlas, 13 483 partner rows carry a non-zero experimental channel, and only 106 pairs rest on an interaction measured in M. tuberculosis itself — 0.3 % of the network. Those 106 are long-established complexes (ESX-1/ESAT-6, RNA polymerase with CarD and RbpA, the Pup–Mpa proteasome, gyrase, Emb, GarA with PknB and PknG, the Rel modules); no still-uncharacterised gene is among them. The reason is not a gap in this atlas but in the literature: there is almost no experimental interactome of this bacterium, IntAct holding 134 curated protein pairs for a ~4 000-gene proteome. A exp (transferred) badge is therefore a lead, never a measurement, and an absence of badge is not evidence that the pair does not interact.

Evidence

  • Member of the SMK (sulfomenaquinone) biosynthetic operon with stf3/cyp128; promoter activity (Sogi 2016, PMID 27933784)
  • 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_216785.1)
  • Domains: Pfam-A via hmmscan --cut_ga — none above threshold
  • Sequence-level signal: ESM Atlas (EvolutionaryScale × BioHub) — exploratory
  • Curated reference: UniProt P9WLF9 (SwissProt, reviewed; Evidence at transcript level)
  • Intra-MTBC selection: pN/pS and disruption from SPDI variants of 142 601 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 — 4 functional partner(s); context anchor cyp128
  • Essentiality: genome-wide transposon mutagenesis in H37Rv — DeJesus et al. 2017 (mBio, doi:10.1128/mBio.02133-16, CC BY)
  • Functional category: TubercuList scheme (Cole et al. 1998, doi:10.1038/31159), via Mycobrowser (Kapopoulou et al. 2011, doi:10.1016/j.tube.2010.09.006)
  • Orthologues: reciprocal best hits (DIAMOND, Buchfink et al. 2021, doi:10.1038/s41592-021-01101-x) against Mycobrowser release 5 reference proteomes
  • Genomic context / operon: H37Rv annotation; operon predicted by co-directional intergenic distance (Salgado et al. 2000, doi:10.1073/pnas.030539397)
  • Mutant phenotypes: standardized Tn-seq compendium MtbTnDB (Jinich et al. 2025, doi:10.1111/mmi.15370), aggregating many primary Tn-seq studies across conditions
  • Physico-chemical properties: ExPASy ProtParam method via Biopython (Gasteiger et al. 2005), computed from the MTBC0 sequence
  • Predicted localisation: DeepTMHMM (Hallgren et al. 2022, doi:10.1101/2022.04.08.487609) for transmembrane topology and signal peptide
  • Primary literature: Sogi KM, Holsclaw CM, Fragiadakis GK, Nomura DK, Leary JA, Bertozzi CR (2016). Biosynthesis and Regulation of Sulfomenaquinone, a Metabolite Associated with Virulence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis ACS Infect Dis 2(11):800-806. doi:10.1021/acsinfecdis.6b00106 PMID:27933784

Ancestral MTBC0 protein sequence

>mtbc0_002411|Rv2269c|
MANDARPLARLANCRVGDQSSATHAYTVGPVLGVPPTGGVDLRYGGRAGIGRSETVTDHGAVGRRYHQPCAGQIRLSELRVTILLRCETLCETAQLLRCPPLPCDCSTPL