3.8 Protein and Nucleic Acid Folding: Domain Swapping in Proteins

Among thousands of homo-oligomeric protein structures, there is a small but growing subset of ‘domain-swapped’ proteins. The term ‘domain swapping,’ originally coined by D. Eisenberg, describes a scenario in which two or more polypeptide chains exchange identical units for oligomerization. This type of assembly could play a role in disease-related aggregation and amyloid formation or as a specific mechanism for regulating function. This chapter introduces terms and features concerning domain swapping, summarizes ideas about its putative mechanisms, reports on domain-swapped structures collected from the literature, and describes a few notable examples in detail.