Tandem duplication, circular permutation, molecular adaptation: how Solanaceae resist pests via inhibitors

Background: The Potato type II (Pot II) family of proteinase inhibitors plays critical roles in the defense system of plants from Solanaceae family against pests. To better understand the evolution of this family, we investigated the correlation between sequence and structural repeats within this family and the evolution and molecular adaptation of Pot II genes through computational analysis, using the putative ancestral domain sequence as the basic repeat unit. Results: Our analysis discovered the following interesting findings in Pot II family. (1) We classified the structural domains in Pot II family into three types (original repeat domain, circularly permuted domain, the two-chain domain) according to the existence of two linkers between the two domain components, which clearly show the circular permutation relationship between the original repeat domain and circularly permuted domain. (2) The permuted domains appear more stable than original repeat domain, from available structu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Lesheng Kong, Shoba Ranganathan
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Original Repeat Domain, Pot II, Pot II Family