Comprehensive comparative analysis of kinesins in photosynthetic eukaryotes.docVIP

BMC Genomics BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Comprehensive comparative analysis of kinesins in photosynthetic eukaryotes Dale N Richardson1, Mark P Simmons1 and Anireddy SN Reddy*2 Address: 1Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA, 80523 and 2Department of Biology and Program in Cell and Molecular Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA, 80523 Email: Dale N Richardson - dalesan@; Mark P Simmons - psimmons@; Anireddy SN Reddy* - reddy@ * Corresponding author Published: 31 January 2006 Received: 01 September 2005 Accepted: 31 January 2006 BMC Genomics2006, 7:18 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-18 This article is available from: /1471-2164/7/18 ? 2006Richardson et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Kinesins, a superfamily of molecular motors, use microtubules as tracks and transport diverse cellular cargoes. All kinesins contain a highly conserved ~350 amino acid motor domain. Previous analysis of the completed genome sequence of one flowering plant (Arabidopsis) has resulted in identification of 61 kinesins. The recent completion of genome sequencing of several photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic eukaryotes that belong to divergent lineages offers a unique opportunity to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of kinesins in plant and non- plant systems and infer their evolutionary relationships. Results: We used the kinesin motor domain to identify kinesins in the completed genome sequences of 19 species, including 13 newly sequenced genomes. Among the newly analyzed genomes, six represent photosynthetic eukaryotes. A total of 529 kinesins was used to perform comprehensive a