Selenoproteins in
Nanorana parkeri




Abstract

Selenoproteins are the main basis of this project. These proteins are characterized by the presence of a selenocysteine in their protein chain, and have usually been miscategorized due to its encoded codon (UGA), which normally works as a stop codon. Nevertheless, the presence of these selenoproteins in all organism linages has been described in literature. Different studies were focused on correcting this lack of categorization of selenoproteins by the interpretation of the results achieved by different bioinformatics tools that allows them to identify a selenoprotein in an organism. At this point, the aim of our project was to characterize the selenoproteome in one organism of the frog lineage, the Nanorana parkeri. As reference specie to base our homology study we have chosen Xenopus tropicalis, due to its close phylogeny within the frog lineage. Although, in some cases this specie did not allowed us to do the analysis, we elected Homo sapiens as the reference specie. In order to achieve our goal we created an automatized process using different sequence alignment programs to obtain the predicted sequence of the Nanorana parkeri. This project attempts to provide a phylogenetic approach for some selenoproteins families found in Nanorana parkeri genome.