Periodicity in high sulphur proteins from wool

Abstract

IN a recent publication¹, Elleman, Lindley and Rowlands claimed that there is no evidence to support the view that high-sulphur proteins from wool have a common ancestral protein partly composed of a repeating unit of five amino acids^2,3. Their evidence for a repeating decapeptide unit is restricted almost entirely to the region between residues 22 and 64 of protein SCMKB2B. Although the C terminal region of this sequence shows some correlation to the repeating decapeptide unit, it correlates better with a pentapeptide repeating unit as shown previously (ref. 3).