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      Drawing the tree of eukaryotic life based on the analysis of 2,269 manually annotated myosins from 328 species

      research-article
      1 , 1 ,
      Genome Biology
      BioMed Central

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          Abstract

          The tree of eukaryotic life was reconstructed based on the analysis of 2,269 myosin motor domains from 328 organisms, confirming some accepted relationships of major taxa and resolving disputed and preliminary classifications.

          Abstract

          Background

          The evolutionary history of organisms is expressed in phylogenetic trees. The most widely used phylogenetic trees describing the evolution of all organisms have been constructed based on single-gene phylogenies that, however, often produce conflicting results. Incongruence between phylogenetic trees can result from the violation of the orthology assumption and stochastic and systematic errors.

          Results

          Here, we have reconstructed the tree of eukaryotic life based on the analysis of 2,269 myosin motor domains from 328 organisms. All sequences were manually annotated and verified, and were grouped into 35 myosin classes, of which 16 have not been proposed previously. The resultant phylogenetic tree confirms some accepted relationships of major taxa and resolves disputed and preliminary classifications. We place the Viridiplantae after the separation of Euglenozoa, Alveolata, and Stramenopiles, we suggest a monophyletic origin of Entamoebidae, Acanthamoebidae, and Dictyosteliida, and provide evidence for the asynchronous evolution of the Mammalia and Fungi.

          Conclusion

          Our analysis of the myosins allowed combining phylogenetic information derived from class-specific trees with the information of myosin class evolution and distribution. This approach is expected to result in superior accuracy compared to single-gene or phylogenomic analyses because the orthology problem is resolved and a strong determinant not depending on any technical uncertainties is incorporated, the class distribution. Combining our analysis of the myosins with high quality analyses of other protein families, for example, that of the kinesins, could help in resolving still questionable dependencies at the origin of eukaryotic life.

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          Most cited references30

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          Multiple sequence alignment with the Clustal series of programs.

          R Chenna (2003)
          The Clustal series of programs are widely used in molecular biology for the multiple alignment of both nucleic acid and protein sequences and for preparing phylogenetic trees. The popularity of the programs depends on a number of factors, including not only the accuracy of the results, but also the robustness, portability and user-friendliness of the programs. New features include NEXUS and FASTA format output, printing range numbers and faster tree calculation. Although, Clustal was originally developed to run on a local computer, numerous Web servers have been set up, notably at the EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/clustalw/).
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            The Pfam protein families database.

            Pfam is a large collection of protein families and domains. Over the past 2 years the number of families in Pfam has doubled and now stands at 6190 (version 10.0). Methodology improvements for searching the Pfam collection locally as well as via the web are described. Other recent innovations include modelling of discontinuous domains allowing Pfam domain definitions to be closer to those found in structure databases. Pfam is available on the web in the UK (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Software/Pfam/), the USA (http://pfam.wustl.edu/), France (http://pfam.jouy.inra.fr/) and Sweden (http://Pfam.cgb.ki.se/).
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              Amino acid substitution matrices from protein blocks.

              Methods for alignment of protein sequences typically measure similarity by using a substitution matrix with scores for all possible exchanges of one amino acid with another. The most widely used matrices are based on the Dayhoff model of evolutionary rates. Using a different approach, we have derived substitution matrices from about 2000 blocks of aligned sequence segments characterizing more than 500 groups of related proteins. This led to marked improvements in alignments and in searches using queries from each of the groups.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Genome Biol
                Genome Biology
                BioMed Central
                1465-6906
                1465-6914
                2007
                18 September 2007
                : 8
                : 9
                : R196
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of NMR-based Structural Biology, Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Am Fassberg, 37077 Goettingen, Germany
                Article
                gb-2007-8-9-r196
                10.1186/gb-2007-8-9-r196
                2375034
                17877792
                714a83ba-7215-4c9c-93de-26d4af1c9978
                Copyright © 2007 Odronitz and Kollmar; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 6 March 2007
                : 17 September 2007
                : 18 September 2007
                Categories
                Research

                Genetics
                Genetics

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