The Evolutionary Relationship of the Domain Architectures in the RhoGEF-containing Proteins

摘要

Domain insertions and deletions lead to variations in the domain architectures of the proteins from their common ancestor. In this work, we investigated four groups of the RhoGEF-containing proteins from different organisms with domain archi- tectures RhoGEF-PH-SH3, SH3-RhoGEF-PH, RhoGEF-PH, and SH3-RhoGEF defined in the Pfam database. The phylogenetic trees were constructed using each individual domain and/or the combinations of all the domains. The phyloge- netic analysis suggests that RhoGEF-PH-SH3 and SH3-RhoGEF-PH might have evolved from RhoGEF-PH through the insertion of SH3 independently, while SH3- RhoGEF of proteins in fruit fly might have evolved from SH3-RhoGEF-PH by the degeneration of PH domain.