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RBR Ubiquitin Ligases: Diversification and Streamlining in Animal Lineages

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Abstract

The patterns of emergence and disappearance in animal species of genes encoding RBR ubiquitin ligases are described. RBR genes can be classified into subfamilies (Parkin, Ariadne, Dorfin, ARA54, etc.) according to sequence and structural data. Here, I show that most animal-specific RBR subfamilies emerged early in animal evolution, and that ancient animals, before the cnidarian/bilaterian split, had a set of RBR genes, which was as complex as the one currently found in mammals. However, some lineages (nematodes, dipteran insects) have recently suffered multiple losses, leading to a highly simplified set of RBR genes. Genes of a particular RBR subfamily, characterized by containing a helicase domain and so far found only in plants, are present also in some animal species. The meaning of these patterns of diversification and streamlining are discussed at the light of functional data. Extreme evolutionary conservation may be related to gene products having housekeeping functions.

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Acknowledgments

Research supported by grant 200720I021 (Proyectos intramurales especiales, CSIC, Spain) and grant BIO2008-05067 (Programa Nacional de Biotecnología; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain).

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  1. Instituto de Biomedicina de Valencia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IBV-CSIC), Calle Jaime Roig, 11, 46010, Valencia, Spain

    Ignacio Marín

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Correspondence to Ignacio Marín.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material 1

This contains the alignment of RBR sequences (indicating species and accession numbers) in FASTA format (TXT 288 kb)

This file is unfortunately not in the Publisher's archive anymore:

Supplementary material 2. This contains the NJ phylogenetic tree with bootstrap values that corresponds to Fig. 1 in the paper. It can be visualized with MEGA 4 (MTS 1201 kb)

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Marín, I. RBR Ubiquitin Ligases: Diversification and Streamlining in Animal Lineages. J Mol Evol 69, 54–64 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-009-9252-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-009-9252-3

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