PPE68 Family assigned · medium auto-curated

H37Rv Rv3873 · MTBC0 - · 368 aa · 4351075–4352181 (+) · RefSeq YP_178022.1

Annotation: from legacy to revised

Legacy (H37Rv / Mycobrowser)PPE family protein PPE68
MTBC0 PGAP re-annotation
Revised (this work)PPE family protein PPE68. Pfam: PPE (PF00823.26).

Auto-curated: this verdict and function were generated by rules from PGAP + Pfam + Foldseek and have not been hand-reviewed.

Annotated on the H37Rv protein: this gene has no 1:1 ancestral MTBC0 anchor (PE/PPE, paralogue, IS element, or otherwise unanchored CDS).

Curated reference (UniProt)

UniProt P9WHW9 SwissProt · reviewed · Evidence at protein level
UniProt namePPE family immunomodulator PPE68
Curated functionPlays a major role in RD1-associated pathogenesis, and may contribute to the establishment and maintenance of M.tuberculosis infection. Together with PE35, stimulates the secretion of IL-10 and MCP-1 from human macrophages, via the interaction with human Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2). Stimulates high levels of gamma interferon secretion in peripheral blood mononuclear cells isolated from tuberculosis patients, as well as from healthy tuberculin purified protein derivative-positive donors. Does not interfere with the secretion and immunogenicity of EsxA (ESAT-6) and EsxB (CFP-10).

Functional vocabulary (eggNOG-mapper, orthology transfer)

COG category N Cell motility
eggNOG descriptionPPE family
Orthologous groupCOG5651

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, 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.

Domains (Pfam, hmmscan --cut_ga)

PfamAccessioni-EvalueResiduesDescription
PPEPF00823.26 3.7e-513–159 PPE family

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

Closest characterised functional partner: espG1 (ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspG), high confidence from genomic context alone (score 935 excluding text-mining).

PartnerProductScoreNo text-miningChannels (≥400)
Rv3866 espG1 ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspG 957 935 ctx neighborhood:571 coexpression:855
Rv3864 espE ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspE 894 883 coexpression:850
Rv3872 PE35 PE family protein PE35 988 834 ctx neighborhood:681 experimental:500 textmining:933
Rv3874 esxB ESAT-6-like protein EsxB 963 788 ctx neighborhood:776 textmining:834
Rv3878 espJ ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspJ 939 782 coexpression:716 textmining:735
Rv3868 eccA1 ESX-1 secretion system protein EccA1 798 709 ctx neighborhood:628
Rv3870 eccCa1 ESX-1 secretion system protein EccCa 705 691 ctx neighborhood:672
Rv3869 eccB1 ESX-1 secretion system protein EccB 723 689 ctx neighborhood:672
Rv3871 eccCb1 ESX-1 secretion system protein EccCb 868 660 ctx neighborhood:643 textmining:628
Rv3875 esxA ESAT-6 protein EsxA 931 631 ctx neighborhood:609 textmining:823
Rv3876 espI ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspI 811 627 coexpression:449 textmining:515
Rv3867 espH ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspH 590 590
Rv3881c espB ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspB 648 531 coexpression:474
Rv3877 eccD1 ESX-1 secretion system protein EccD1 528 396
Rv3865 espF ESX-1 secretion-associated protein EspF 569 373

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

  • Annotation from H37Rv (no MTBC0 1:1 anchor; H37Rv protein used): PPE family protein PPE68
  • Pfam (hmmscan --cut_ga): PPE PF00823.26 (E=4e-51)
  • (auto-curated by rules from PGAP + Pfam + Foldseek; not hand-reviewed)

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 YP_178022.1)
  • Domains: Pfam-A via hmmscan --cut_ga — PPE (PF00823.26)
  • 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 COG5651
  • Curated reference: UniProt P9WHW9 (SwissProt, reviewed; Evidence at protein 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 — 25 functional partner(s); context anchor espG1
  • Primary literature: none located yet; annotation rests on the domain/homology sources above.

Ancestral MTBC0 protein sequence

>H37Rv|Rv3873|PPE68
MLWHAMPPELNTARLMAGAGPAPMLAAAAGWQTLSAALDAQAVELTARLNSLGEAWTGGGSDKALAAATPMVVWLQTASTQAKTRAMQATAQAAAYTQAMATTPSLPEIAANHITQAVLTATNFFGINTIPIALTEMDYFIRMWNQAALAMEVYQAETAVNTLFEKLEPMASILDPGASQSTTNPIFGMPSPGSSTPVGQLPPAATQTLGQLGEMSGPMQQLTQPLQQVTSLFSQVGGTGGGNPADEEAAQMGLLGTSPLSNHPLAGGSGPSAGAGLLRAESLPGAGGSLTRTPLMSQLIEKPVAPSVMPAAAAGSSATGGAAPVGAGAMGQGAQSGGSTRPGLVAPAPLAQEREEDDEDDWDEEDDW