TreeDom: a graphical web tool for analysing domain architecture evolution

摘要

We present TreeDom, a web tool for graphically analysing the evolutionary history of domains in multi-domain proteins. Individual domains on the same protein chain may have distinct evolutionary histories, which is important to grasp in order to understand protein function. For instance, it may be important to know whether a domain was duplicated recently or long ago, to know the origin of inserted domains, or to know the pattern of domain loss within a protein family. TreeDom uses the Pfam database as the source of domain annotations, and displays these on a sequence tree. An advantage of TreeDom is that the user can limit the analysis to N sequences that are most similar to a query, or provide a list of sequence IDs to include. Using the Pfam alignment of the selected sequences, a tree is built and displayed together with the domain architecture of each sequence.