Title

Phylogenetic Analysis of the vesicular fusion SNARE machinery revealing its functional divergence across Eukaryotes

Authors

Gagandeep K. Khurana¹, Poonam Vishwakarma², Niti Puri^1*, Andrew Michael Lynn^2*

Affiliation

¹School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India- 110067;

²School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India-110067

Email

andrew@jnu.ac.in

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received July 11, 2018; Revised July 12, 2018; Accepted July 30, 2018; Published July 31, 2018

Proteins of the SNARE (Soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptors) family play a significant role in all vesicular fusion events involved in endocytic and exocytic pathways. These proteins act as molecular machines that assemble into tight four-helix bundle complex, bridging the opposing membranes into close proximity forming membrane fusion. Almost all SNARE proteins share a 53 amino acid coiled-coil domain, which is mostly linked to the transmembrane domain at the C-terminal end. Despite significant variations between SNARE sequences across species, the SNARE mediated membrane fusion is evolutionary conserved in all eukaryotes. It is of interest to compare the functional divergence of SNARE proteins across various eukaryotic groups during evolution. Here, we report an exhaustive phylogeny of the SNARE proteins retrieved from SNARE database including plants, animals, fungi and protists. The Initial phylogeny segregated SNARE protein sequences into five well-supported clades Qa, Qb, Qc, Qbc and R reflective of their positions in the four-helix SNARE complex. The Qa, Qb, Qc and R family specific trees were reconstructed, each of these were further segregated into organelle specific clades at first and later diverged into lineage specific subgroups to improve resolution. This revealed that most of the SNARE orthologs are conserved at subcellular locations or at trafficking pathways across various species during eukaryotic evolution. The paralogous expansion in SNARE repertoire was observed at metazoans (animals) and plants independently during eukaryotic evolution. However, results also show that the multi-cellular and saprophytic fungi have limited SNAREs.

Keywords

SNAREs, clade, Phylogeny, transmembrane domain, paralogs.

Citation

Khurana et al. Bioinformation 14(7): 361-368 (2018)

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.