Search results for "Molecular sequence"
showing 10 items of 1972 documents
Complement component C3: molecular basis of the C3*S025 variant and evidence for molecular heterogeneity of other variants.
1995
Complement component 3 (C3) is the central molecule of the complement system. It displays a number of polymorphic variants with, as yet, unclear functional consequences. We have investigated a number of rare C3 variants by PCR-SSCP (polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism) analysis and could identify the molecular basis of a C3*S025 variant. The decreased electrophoretic mobility of this protein is caused by the exchange of a neutral serine residue to an arginine residue (positively charged). This exchange is unlikely to have functional consequences as it maps to the C-terminus of the alpha-chain. C3 variants appear to have originated from various independent mutat…
Partial Sequence Homogenization in the 5S Multigene Families May Generate Sequence Chimeras and Spurious Results in Phylogenetic Reconstructions
2014
Multigene families have provided opportunities for evolutionary biologists to assess molecular evolution processes and phylogenetic reconstructions at deep and shallow systematic levels. However, the use of these markers is not free of technical and analytical challenges. Many evolutionary studies that used the nuclear 5S rDNA gene family rarely used contiguous 5S coding sequences due to the routine use of head-to-tail polymerase chain reaction primers that are anchored to the coding region. Moreover, the 5S coding sequences have been concatenated with independent, adjacent gene units in many studies, creating simulated chimeric genes as the raw data for evolutionary analysis. This practice…
Extreme genome reduction in Buchnera spp.: Toward the minimal genome needed for symbiotic life
2002
Buchnera is a mutualistic intracellular symbiont of aphids. Their association began about 200 million years ago, with host and symbiont lineages evolving in parallel since that time. During this coevolutionary process, Buchnera has experienced a dramatic decrease of genome size, retaining only essential genes for its specialized lifestyle. Previous studies reported that genome size in Buchnera spp. is very uniform, suggesting that genome shrinkage occurred early in evolution, and that modern lineages retain the genome size of a common ancestor. Our physical mapping of Buchnera genomes obtained from five aphid lineages shows that the genome size is not conserved among them, but has been red…
Further characterization of the histidine gene cluster of Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2): nucleotide sequence and transcriptional analysis of hisD.
1992
We have further characterized the genomic region of Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2) that contains genes involved in the biosynthesis of histidine. A 2,357-base pair fragment contained in plasmid pSCH3328 that complemented hisD mutations has been sequenced. Computer analysis revealed an open reading frame that encodes a protein with significant homology to the Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and Mycobacterium smegmatis hisD product, Saccharomyces cerevisiae HIS4C, and Neurospora crassa his3 gene products. Two other contiguous open reading frames oriented divergently with respect to hisD did not show significant similarity with any of the his genes or to other sequences included in the…
Molecular analysis of METTL1, a novel human methyltransferase-like gene with a high degree of phylogenetic conservation.
1999
A novel human gene, METTL1, has been identified by its sequence similarity to the yeast ORF YDL201w. The human cDNA and the genomic structure of METTL1 have been analyzed. The transcript contains 1292 nucleotides and codes for a protein of 276 amino acids. The gene consists of seven exons and extends over 3.5 kb. The six introns vary in length between 93 and 1137 nucleotides. The gene is transcribed in a large variety of organs and tissues and shows differential splicing of two exons, giving rise to at least three different transcripts. The METTL1 gene was assigned to chromosome 12q13 by radiation hybrid mapping. The METTL1 gene product shows high sequence similarities to putative proteins …
Short duplication in a cDNA clone of the rbcL gene from Picea abies.
1995
The plastidic rbcL gene encodes the LSU of Rubisco (EC 4.1.1.39), the enzyme that catalyzes CO, fixation during photosynthesis (Hallick and Bottomley, 1983). In higher plants the enzyme structure is commonly given as a hexadecameric structure composed of eight LSUs and eight small subunits. Nucleotide sequence data from the rbcL gene have been used extensively in studies of plant phylogeny and molecular evolution (Morden and Golden, 1991; Pasternak and Glick, 1992). To investigate the expression of the rbcL gene in damaged and undamaged Norway spruce trees (Picea abies), we have isolated a rbcL cDNA clone via reverse transcriptasePCR (Table I). Using the proofreading ability of the DNA poly…
Gene structure and function of tyrosine kinases in the marine sponge Geodia cydonium: Autapomorphic characters of Metazoa
1999
Abstract Porifera (sponges) represent the most ancient, extant metazoan phylum. They existed already prior to the ‘Cambrian Explosion’. Based on the analysis of aa sequences of informative proteins, it is highly likely that all metazoan phyla evolved from only one common ancestor (monophyletic origin). As ‘autapomorphic’ proteins which are restricted to Metazoa only, integrin receptors, receptors with scavenger receptor cysteine-rich repeats, neuronal-like receptors and protein–tyrosine kinases (PTKs) have been identified in Porifera. From the marine sponge Geodia cydonium , a receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) has been cloned that comprises the characteristic structural topology known from oth…
Specific roles of 5′ RNA secondary structures in stabilizing transcripts in chloroplasts
2005
RNA secondary structures, e.g. stem-loops that are often found at the 5' and 3' ends of mRNAs, are in many cases known to be crucial for transcript stability but their role in prolonging the lifetime of transcripts remains elusive. In this study we show for an essential RNA-stabilizing stem-loop at the 5' end of rbcL gene transcripts in Chlamydomonas that it neither prevents ribonucleases from binding to the RNA nor impedes their movement along the RNA strand. The stem-loop has a formative function in that it mediates folding of a short sequence around its base into a specific RNA conformation, consisting of a helical and single-stranded region, i.e. the real structure required for longevit…
Rapid evolution of translational control mechanisms in RNA genomes
1997
We have introduced 13 base substitutions into the coat protein gene of RNA bacteriophage MS2. The mutations, which are clustered ahead of the overlapping lysis cistron, do not change the amino acid sequence of the coat protein, but they disrupt a local hairpin, which is needed to control translation of the lysis gene. The mutations decreased the phage titer by four orders of magnitude but, upon passaging, the virus accumulated suppressor mutations that raised the fitness to almost wild-type level. Analysis of the pseudorevertants showed that the disruption of the local hairpin, controlling expression of the lysis gene, had apparently been so complete that its restoration by chance mutations…
Subrepeats result from regional DNA sequence conservation in tandem repeats in Chironomus telomeres
1990
Repeat units, widespread in eukaryotic genomes, are often partially or entirely built up of subrepeats. Homogenization between whole repeat units arranged in tandem usually can best be understood as a result of unequal crossing over. Such a mechanism is less plausible for maintaining similarities between subrepeats within a repeat unit when present in a regular array. In Chironomus telomeres, large blocks of tandemly repeated approximately 350 base-pair units contain two or three pairs of subrepeats with high mutual identities, embedded in linker DNA, non-repetitive within the repeat unit. Measurements of evolutionary base changes in two closely related species, Chironomus tentans and Chiro…