Diversity of Eukaryotic Translational Initiation Factor eIF4E in Protists.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Comparative and Functional Genomics Volume 2012, Article ID 134839, 21 pages doi:10.1155/2012/134839 Review Article Diversity of Eukaryotic Translational Initiation Factor eIF4E in Protists Rosemary Jagus,1 Tsvetan R. Bachvaroff,2 Bhavesh Joshi,3 and Allen R. Place1 1 Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, 701 E. Pratt Street, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA 2 Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, 647 Contees Wharf Road, Edgewater, MD 21037, USA 3 BridgePath Scientific, 4841 International Boulevard, Suite 105, Frederick, MD 21703, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Rosemary Jagus, jagus@ Received 26 January 2012; Accepted 9 April 2012 Academic Editor: Thomas Preiss Copyright © 2012 Rosemary Jagus et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The greatest diversity of eukaryotic species is within the microbial eukaryotes, the protists, with plants and fungi/metazoa representing just two of the estimated seventy five lineages of eukaryotes. Protists are a diverse group characterized by unusual genome features and a wide range of genome sizes from 8.2 Mb in the apicomplexan parasite Babesia bovis to 112,000-220,050 Mb in the dinoflagellate Prorocentrum micans. Protists possess numerous cellular, molecular and biochemical traits not observed in “text-book” model organisms. These features challenge some of the concepts and assumptions about the regulation of gene expression in eukaryotes. Like multicellular eukaryotes, many protists encode multiple