3bsqA Discussion

Multiple sequence alighment (MSA) revealed some conserved residues throughput the whole sulfatase family. Previous experiemnts describe a set of crutial residues for the sulfatase function of an enzyme. A histidine residue (H) and two or more sequential arganine residues (R) are known to be essential, and also characteristic of the N-terminal active site of sulfatases. Our MSA resultaes a a set of residues conserves in the N-terminus, along with a H and one R residue. When these conserved residues were marked in the three dimnetional view of ASK in PyMol, they all seemed clustered within a certain region of the molecule. moreover, this region is deep inside the molecule, directly inside a pocket-like surface feature.

Results of structural comparisons