Abstract
Background: Gene duplication events have played a significant role in genome evolution, particularly in plants. Exhaustive searches for all members of a known gene family as well as the identification of new gene families has become increasingly important. Subfunctionalization via changes in regulatory sequences following duplication (adaptive selection) appears to be a common mechanism of evolution in plants and can be accompanied by purifying selection on the coding region. Such negative selection can be detected by a bias toward synonymous over nonsynonymous substitutions. However, the process of identifying this bias requires many steps usually employing several different software programs. We have simplified the process and significantly shortened the time required by condensing many steps into a few scripts or programs to rapidly identify putative gene family members beginning with a single query sequence.
RESULTS : in this report we 1) describe the software tools (SimESTs, PCAT, and SCAT) developed to automate the gene family identification, 2) demonstrate the validity of the method by correctly identifying 3 of 4 PAL gene family members from Arabidopsis using EST data alone, 3) identify 2 to 6 CAD gene family members from Glycine max (previously unidentified), and 4) identify 2 members of a putative Glycine max gene family previously unidentified in any plant species.
CONCLUSION : Gene families in plants, particularly that subset where purifying selection has occurred in the coding region, can be identified quickly and easily by integrating our software tools and commonly available contig assembly and ORF identification programs.
Recommended Citation
R. L. Frank et al., "An Automated Method for Rapid Identification of Putative Gene Family Members in Plants," BMC Bioinformatics, vol. 7, no. SUPPL.2, BioMed Central, Sep 2006.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-7-S2-S19
Meeting Name
3rd Annual Conference of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (2006: Mar. 2-4, Baton Rouge, LA)
Department(s)
Biological Sciences
Second Department
Computer Science
Keywords and Phrases
Arabidopsis; Gene Duplication; Glycine max; Putative Gene
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1471-2105
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2006 Frank et al., All rights reserved.
Publication Date
26 Sep 2006
PubMed ID
17118140
