Structural insight with mutational impact on tyrosinase and PKC-β interaction from Homo sapiens: Molecular modeling and docking studies for melanogenesis, albinism and increased risk for melanoma.

Human tyrosinase, is an important protein for biosynthetic pathway of melanin. It was studied to be phosphorylated and activated by protein kinase-C, β-subunit (PKC-β) through earlier experimentations with in vivo evidences. Documentation documents that mutation in two essentially vital serine residues in C-terminal end of tyrosinase leads to albinism. Due to the deficiency of protective shield like enzyme; melanin, albinos are at an increased peril for melanoma and other skin cancers. So, computational and residue-level insight including a mutational exploration with evolutionary importance into this mechanism lies obligatory for future pathological and therapeutic developments. Therefore, functional tertiary models of the relevant proteins were analyzed after satisfying their stereo-chemical features. Evolutionarily paramount residues for the activation of tyrosinase were perceived via multiple sequence alignment phenomena. Mutant-type tyrosinase protein (S98A and S102A) was thereby modeled, maintaining the wild-type proteins' functionality. Furthermore, this present comparative study discloses the variation in the stable residual participation (for mutant-type and wild-type tyrosinase-PKCβ complex). Mainly, an increased number of polar negatively charged residues from the wild-type tyrosinase participated with PKC-β, predominantly. Fascinatingly supported by evaluation of statistical significances, mutation even led to a destabilizing impact in tyrosinase accompanied by conformational switches with a helix-to-coil transition in the mutated protein. Even the allosteric sites in the protein got poorly hampered upon mutation leading to weaker tendency for binding partners to interact.