Similar to varying higher taxa proportions in mussel aggregations at GC of this study, the tubeworm aggregation at the East Pacific Rise vent site Riftia Field also exhibited a high variability (Gollner et al., 2007).
Recently we demonstrated that the synthetic GC Pred modulated platelet aggregation, through a mechanisms that involved engagement of the classical GR [11].
It has been reported that these difference of amino acid compositions alter the characteristics of proteomes and as a consequence, proteins of GC-poor genomes are more prone to misfolding and aggregation compare to GC-rich genomes.
Using whole blood assay we demonstrated that Pred was the only GC able to inhibit platelet aggregation and platelet monocyte interactions.
This phenomenon has been supported by protein folding simulations, which showed that proteins encoded by GC-poor organisms are more prone to aggregation than proteins encoded by GC-rich organisms.
On the basis of these differences, it has been reported that proteins encoded by GC-poor organisms should be more prone to aggregation than proteins encoded by GC-rich organisms.
The NO-donating GC [23], Nitro-Dex, did inhibit aggregation, but this effect is clearly due to the NO moiety, which releases NO in biological fluids, and not to the GC moiety since Dex alone was ineffective.
Previous studies including ours, however, have lead us to rule out RUNX3, Caspase-10, SMAD4, HPP1, and Desmoglein 2 as major GC predisposition genes in families with aggregation of gastric carcinoma (12– 12).
Surprisingly, aggregation propensity decreased with lower GC content independent of symbiotic characteristics, suggesting that GC-poor organisms have indeed evolved a proteome that is devoid of aggregation-prone proteins.
The authors found that, contrary to what expected from the working hypothesis, which would predict a decrease in protein aggregation with an increase in GC richness, the aggregation propensity of proteomes increases with the GC content and thus the stability of the proteome against aggregation increases with the decrease in GC content.
