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Title

 

 

 

 

Evolutionary analysis of WD40 super family proteins involved in spindle checkpoint and RNA export: Molecular evolution of spindle checkpoint

 

Authors

Duvvuru muni Rajasekhara Reddy1, Ashok Aspatwar1, Bhushan Bhalchandra Dholakia1 and Vidya Shrikant Gupta1,*

 

Affiliation

1Plant Molecular Biology Unit, Division of Biochemical Sciences, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune 411008, India

 

Email

vs.gupta@ncl.res.in 

 

Phone

91-20-25902247

 

Fax

91-20-25902648; * Corresponding author

 

Article Type

Hypothesis

 

Date

received July 11, 2008; accepted July 20, 2008; published August 01, 2008

 

Abstract

The spindle checkpoint delays sister chromatid separation until all chromosomes have undergone bipolar spindle attachment. Previous studies have revealed BUB3, as an essential spindle checkpoint protein and its extensive sequence similarity with Rae1 (Gle2), a highly conserved member of WD40 repeat protein family throughout their length which was first shown to be involved in mRNA export. However, the recent discovery of Rae1 as an essential mitotic checkpoint protein, based on the studies from mouse and drosophila, has renewed the interest in its function during cell division. Study of evolution of proteins involved in checkpoint might throw light on evolution of eukaryotic cell cycle regulation. Here we report the evolutionary relationships between these two WD40 repeat family proteins. Amino acid sequences of BUB3 and Rae1 homologs were retrieved from various databases and phylogenetic analysis was performed with the MEGA program. Multiple sequence alignments of these two protein homologues with the ClustalX software revealed specific amino acid signatures corresponding to the protein function and also few amino acids, which are conserved in BUB3 and Rae1 indicating some common overlapping function. Data indicated a common ancestral origin of these two important proteins and further suggest that, BUB3 mediated cell cycle checkpoint might have evolved with compartmentalization of genetic material into the nucleus in eukaryotes.

 

Keywords

WD40; BUB3; Rae1; molecular evolution

Citation

Reddy et al., Bioinformation 2(10): 461-468 (2008)

 

Edited by

P. Kangueane

 

ISSN

0973-2063

 

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.