Cross genome comparisons of serine proteases in Arabidopsis and rice.docVIP

BMC Genomics BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Cross genome comparisons of serine proteases in Arabidopsis and rice Lokesh P Tripathi and R Sowdhamini* Address: National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, GKVK Campus, Bellary Road, Bangalore 560 065, India Email: Lokesh P Tripathi - lokesh@ncbs.res.in; R Sowdhamini* - mini@ncbs.res.in * Corresponding author Published: 09 August 2006 Received: 11 April 2006 Accepted: 09 August 2006 BMC Genomics 2006, 7:200 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-200 This article is available from: /1471-2164/7/200 ? 2006 Tripathi and Sowdhamini; 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: Serine proteases are one of the largest groups of proteolytic enzymes found across all kingdoms of life and are associated with several essential physiological pathways. The availability of Arabidopsis thaliana and rice (Oryza sativa) genome sequences has permitted the identification and comparison of the repertoire of serine protease-like proteins in the two plant species. Results: Despite the differences in genome sizes between Arabidopsis and rice, we identified a very similar number of serine protease-like proteins in the two plant species (206 and 222, respectively). Nearly 40% of the above sequences were identified as potential orthologues. Atypical members could be identified in the plant genomes for Deg, Clp, Lon, rhomboid proteases and species-specific members were observed for the highly populated subtilisin and serine carboxypeptidase families suggesting multiple lateral gene transfers. DegP proteases, prolyl oligopeptidases, Clp proteases and rhomboids share a significantly higher percentage orthology between the t