Molecular Phylogeny of OVOL Genes Illustrates a Conserved C2H2 Zinc Finger Domain Coupled by Hypervariable Unstructured Regions

Kumar, A., Bhandari, A., Sinha, R., Sardar, P., Goyal, P., Goswami, C., Grapputo, A. (June 2012) Molecular Phylogeny of OVOL Genes Illustrates a Conserved C2H2 Zinc Finger Domain Coupled by Hypervariable Unstructured Regions. PLoS ONE, 7 (6). e39399. ISSN 1932-6203

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DOI: e3939910.1371/journal.pone.0039399

Abstract

OVO-like proteins (OVOL) are members of the zinc finger protein family and serve as transcription factors to regulate gene expression in various differentiation processes. Recent studies have shown that OVOL genes are involved in epithelial development and differentiation in a wide variety of organisms; yet there is a lack of comprehensive studies that describe OVOL proteins from an evolutionary perspective. Using comparative genomic analysis, we traced three different OVOL genes (OVOL1-3) in vertebrates. One gene, OVOL3, was duplicated during a whole-genome-duplication event in fish, but only the copy (OVOL3b) was retained. From early-branching metazoa to humans, we found that a core domain, comprising a tetrad of C2H2 zinc fingers, is conserved. By domain comparison of the OVOL proteins, we found that they evolved in different metazoan lineages by attaching intrinsically-disordered (ID) segments of N/C-terminal extensions of 100 to 1000 amino acids to this conserved core. These ID regions originated independently across different animal lineages giving rise to different types of OVOL genes over the course of metazoan evolution. We illustrated the molecular evolution of metazoan OVOL genes over a period of 700 million years (MY). This study both extends our current understanding of the structure/function relationship of metazoan OVOL genes, and assembles a good platform for further characterization of OVOL genes from diverged organisms.

Item Type: Paper
Uncontrolled Keywords: intrinsically disordered proteins multiple sequence alignment natively unfolded proteins drosophila-ovo genome sequence evolution transcription database differentiation duplication
Subjects: bioinformatics > genomics and proteomics > genetics & nucleic acid processing
bioinformatics > genomics and proteomics > genetics & nucleic acid processing > protein structure, function, modification
bioinformatics > genomics and proteomics > genetics & nucleic acid processing > protein structure, function, modification > protein types
bioinformatics > genomics and proteomics > genetics & nucleic acid processing > protein structure, function, modification > protein types > zinc finger proteins
CSHL Authors:
Communities: CSHL labs > Krainer lab
Depositing User: Matt Covey
Date: 21 June 2012
Date Deposited: 30 Jan 2013 17:06
Last Modified: 30 Jan 2013 17:06
PMCID: PMC3380836
Related URLs:
URI: https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/26984

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