Rv3898c Still unknown · low

Annotation: from legacy to revised

Curation note: 2026-09-18 (projet mtbc/Rv3896c-Rv3898c, P7.2): fusion Rv3898c/Rv3897c documentee (un seul gene de 329 aa dans l'espece), stop L4-specifique identifie et corrobore par une source externe (Bhattacharyya 2020), start confirme par peptide (Kelkar 2011), absence de repli etendue a la forme complete de l'espece par Boltz-2 (P3.2). auto=false. Verdict INCHANGE (dark, correct : toujours aucun domaine).

In the literature (TB corpus sweep) named only in full text

No TB publication mentions this locus tag in its title or abstract (sweep of a ~330k-abstract PubMed TB corpus). A full-text search does however find 6 paper(s) naming this gene in their body text — see the full-text field below. The gene remains dark on function, but it is not unmentioned, and this page no longer claims that it is.

Scope of the sweep: What was actually swept: the H37Rv locus tag and the ortholog locus tags (M. bovis Mb…, M. marinum MMAR_…, M. smegmatis MSMEG_…, M. leprae ML…, M. abscessus MAB_…), plus the gene name where one exists. NOT swept: protein and enzyme names, including family shorthands such as Ldt(Mt4) or VapC28, and their orthographic variants. An absent locus-tag mention is therefore evidence about the TAG, and only indirect evidence about the protein (P18.14).

An antigen status or a virulence phenotype is NOT a molecular function: the verdict stays unchanged. This layer adds the missing context, it does not requalify the gene. 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 of title+abstract: the 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, 2026-07-13.

Intrinsic disorder (sequence + structure) dark by construction (IDR-orphan)

both sequence (metapredict) and structure (low AlphaFold pLDDT) indicate little stable globular structure: this gene is dark BY CONSTRUCTION — there is no confident fold for structure/homology search to match, so its obscurity is expected, not a pipeline failure

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).

Why this gene is still unknown (classification, not failure) ORPHAN

The detectors cannot speak here. WALL OF MEASURABILITY, of the opposite kind: length is not the problem, silence is. No domain, no confident model, no significant structural hit, no named operon partner, no strong STRING partner, no phenotype, no regulon. Nothing to reason from. This is the only class where 'unknown' is qualified by nothing at all.

Read with care. A statement about what can be MEASURED on this gene today, not a claim that it has no function, and revisable: a gene enters or leaves this class as the layers change. It stays counted among the dark. phase117_hard_residue.py (P8-résidu-dur), 2026-08-10.

CRISPRi vulnerability

Vulnerability index -1.43 (95% CI -8.88 to 6.54). 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=0.182 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)

The legacy Mycobrowser record is shown for verification. Mycobrowser is no longer maintained; its EC numbers predate recent nomenclature revisions, so a class change usually reflects re-numbering, not a conflict.

Curated reference (UniProt)

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

Functional vocabulary (eggNOG-mapper, orthology transfer)

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, 142 601 strains, snapshot of 2026-09-29)

Read the disruption percentage against its ceiling, not against 100%. The strain collection is deeply imbalanced by clade, so a loss fixed in an entire lineage still shows a small overall fraction: a gene disrupted in every L6 strain caps at 0.96% of the collection, in every M. caprae strain at 0.20%, in every M. microti strain at 0.02%. Of the 705 clades in this collection, 689 have a ceiling below 1%. A figure of "0.15% of strains" is therefore uninterpretable on its own — it can be noise or a complete, lineage-defining loss. Use the clade attribution row above, which gives the sub-clade sizes, and never read the percentage alone.

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.

Lineage-specific relaxation (candidate, one evidence handle) 1 lineage(s)

Candidate lineage-specific loss-of-function signal: rare/absent in the other well-sampled lineages (<5%) but risen in the listed lineage(s). ONE handle, not a verdict change (P8 two-handle policy) -- the general phenomenon of lineage-specific gene loss reflecting ecotype-specific selective pressure is already established at genome scale (Silva-Pereira et al. 2024); this signal on an individual dark gene needs an independent second handle before any requalification.

Caveat: Sample-size heterogeneity across MTBC lineages (up to 4 orders of magnitude, 16 smaller lineages excluded for n<500); essentiality is NOT resolvable per lineage (TnSeq data is H37Rv-only). For the two smallest adequate lineages (L5 n=630, L6 n=1364) the frequency floor bottoms out at the absolute minimum of 3 carrier strains -- a handful of strains from a SINGLE transmission cluster (clonal outbreak) can pass this floor without representing independent evolutionary origins of the disrupting allele; no phylogenetic correction for clonal sampling was applied. Treat low-count hits in these two lineages with extra caution.

Reference: Silva-Pereira TT, Soler-Camargo NC, Sá Guimarães AM 2024, Microbiology Spectrum, doi:10.1128/spectrum.02289-23

Outgroup conservation (beyond the MTBC) Mycobacterium

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)

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.

Proteomics (mass spectrometry) detected

Detection by mass spectrometry is direct, experimental evidence that the protein product exists — orthogonal to sequence conservation and to Tn-seq essentiality, and especially decisive for a "hypothetical" locus. Read the dataset count as abundance, not as replication. Measured across this atlas (3,491 detected proteins), the number of datasets a protein appears in tracks its abundance almost monotonically: median 1.2 ppm at 1 dataset of 16, 27 ppm at 10, 392 ppm at 15, 1,325 ppm at 16 — three orders of magnitude. A high count therefore says the protein is abundant more than it says several independent experiments confirmed it. What the count does establish, at any value, is that the product exists.

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

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)

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 62.3, 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.

Structural neighbours (Foldseek on the ESMFold model, exploratory)

ESMFold model confidence: mean pLDDT 49.4 (very low). Low-confidence model: the fold may be unreliable, so treat these structural hits with caution.

Best matches against the PDB, ranked by Foldseek homology probability. A high probability / TM-score suggests a shared fold; unless flagged sig (E < 0.01) these are fold hypotheses, not assignments.

Genomic context (neighbours & predicted operon) operon of 2

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)

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.

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: Rv3900c (hypothetical protein), medium confidence (score 503, all STRING channels except text-mining; the partner is chosen on its genomic-context evidence). Read this as a lead toward a shared pathway or operon, not as evidence of a physical complex: when this atlas co-folded 98 such context-only pairs, their predicted interfaces were no more confident than those of length-matched control pairs.

All 7 partner(s) at medium confidence are shown. None rests on an interaction measured in M. tuberculosis itself.

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

• Legacy H37Rv annotation: hypothetical protein
• MTBC0 PGAP product: hypothetical protein
• Foldseek best: 5sva-assembly1_T Mediator-RNA Polymerase II Pre-Initiation Complex (prob 0.38, E=2e+00, TM=0.59)
• (initial automatic assignment: auto-curated by rules from PGAP + Pfam + Foldseek; superseded by hand review)
• Locus is a single 329-aa gene in the species/ancestral form, split into this 110/210-aa H37Rv pair by two independent lineage-specific lesions (project mtbc/Rv3896c-Rv3898c, P3.1, 2026-09-10): direct translation on 12 closed complete genomes without relying on their annotation.
• The N-terminal start codon used by this fiche's 110-aa ORF is independently confirmed by an observed N-terminal peptide (Kelkar et al. 2011, supplementary file 5 of 727 proteins with peptide-confirmed start sites) -- only the STOP position is lineage-specific, the start is not (project mtbc/Rv3896c-Rv3898c, P3.4, 2026-09-10).
• External corroboration of the stop-loss variant in an independent clinical MDR isolate (VPCI591, unrelated to this project's panel): Bhattacharyya et al. 2020, Table 2, genomic position 4383655 / gene-relative T331C -- the same variant recovered by two independent coordinate calculations (project mtbc/Rv3896c-Rv3898c, P3.6, 2026-09-15). A computational WGS variant call, not an experimental validation of this specific site.
• Species-representative full-length structure (329 aa) predicted independently (Boltz-2, GPU A100, 5 diffusion samples, mh/Mesohelios job 268876, 2026-09-18): confidence_score 0.29-0.30, ptm 0.14-0.16, mean pLDDT 0.32-0.33 (0-1 scale, stable across the 5 samples); Foldseek (PDB + AlphaFoldDB/Swiss-Prot) on the best model returns no significant hit (E-value >= 1.0). Project mtbc/Rv3896c-Rv3898c, P3.2, 2026-09-18.

Ancestral MTBC0 protein sequence

>mtbc0_004131|Rv3898c|
MTGDQNPAPGPAPGVPIKVTPEILLQVLTTPPASGPAPFPAVPVDLPAPADIANGALFAAGNSGVPGDVESSGLEDLDRRAHAADAVQKFSANEADAAQQFQGVGAQAEA