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Summary
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1. Introduction
25 selenoprotein genes are known in mammalian genomes, of these, three are selenoproteins as well in D. Melanogaster genome, while many others are Cys-homologues instead in this species. Nothing is known about selenoprotein genes in the other insect genomes sequenced so far: 11 drosophila species, mosquito, and honey bee. The goal of this project is to investigate how many of the 25 human selenoprotein genes exist in the insect genomes either as selenoproteins or Cys-homologues. Are there additional insect selenoprotein genes not present in D. Melanogaster? |
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2. Methods
The project involves tblastn of the 25 human selenoprotein genes against 14 insect genomes. The hits were submitted to exonic structure analysis (exonerate protein2genome 0.8.2); conserved regions were registered by multiple alignment (ClustalW) within each family; SECIS structure analysis was performed for each candidate (SeciSearch 2.0) and finally distances among sequences were established within each family( ClustalW N-J tree). |
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3. Results
We report evidence of novel selenoproteins supported by the methods mentioned above. Cys-orthologues are also found as well as candidates that even not having neither a "Sec" nor a "Cys" have a extremely high conservation level. |
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4. Discussion
We discusse the data within each family in order to establish the significance of our findings, the possible problems ( false positives, false negatives..) and the weakpoints that the method used could have as an aproximation to the reality.An evolutionary model for selenoprotein emerging is also proposed. |
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5. References
Recent articles published about selenoproteins and interest servers in database web-sites. |
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6. Acknowledgements
We thank all our lecturers involved in Bioinformatics theory and practices, specially Charles Chapple for supervising our job. |