Pruyne David
Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, State University of New York Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2017 Oct 5;12(10):e0186081. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186081. eCollection 2017.
Formins are proteins that assist in regulating cytoskeletal organization through interactions with actin filaments and microtubules. Metazoans encode nine distinct formin subtypes based on sequence similarity, potentially allowing for great functional diversity for these proteins. Through the evolution of the eukaryotes, formins are believed to have repeatedly undergone rounds of gene duplications, followed by diversification and domain shuffling, but previous phylogenetic analyses have shed only a little light on the specific origins of different formin subtypes. To improve our understanding of this in the case of the metazoan formins, phylogenetic comparisons were made here of a broad range of metazoan and non-metazoan formin sequences. This analysis suggests a model in which eight of the nine metazoan formin subtypes arose from two ancestral proteins that were present in an ancient unikont ancestor. Additionally, evidence is shown suggesting the common ancestor of unikonts and bikonts was likely to have encoded at least two formins, a canonical Drf-type protein and a formin bearing a PTEN-like domain.
formin蛋白是一类通过与肌动蛋白丝和微管相互作用来协助调节细胞骨架组织的蛋白质。后生动物根据序列相似性编码九种不同的formin亚型，这可能使这些蛋白质具有极大的功能多样性。在真核生物的进化过程中，formin蛋白被认为多次经历基因复制，随后发生多样化和结构域重排，但之前的系统发育分析对不同formin亚型的具体起源揭示甚少。为了更好地理解后生动物formin蛋白的情况，我们在此对广泛的后生动物和非后生动物formin序列进行了系统发育比较。该分析提出了一个模型，即九种后生动物formin亚型中的八种起源于古代单鞭毛生物祖先中存在的两种祖先蛋白。此外，有证据表明单鞭毛生物和双鞭毛生物的共同祖先可能至少编码两种formin蛋白，一种是典型的Drf型蛋白，另一种是带有PTEN样结构域的formin蛋白。
