Comparative genomics and evolutionary analysis of plant CNGCs.

Comparative genomics and computational biology offer powerful research tools for studying evolutionary mechanisms of organisms, and the identification and characterization of conserved/distant genes and gene families. The plant gene family encodes evolutionary conserved ion channel proteins involved in important signaling pathways and biological functions. The fundamental ideas and standard procedures for genome-wide identification and evolutionary analysis of plant cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels employing various software, tools, and online servers have been discussed. In particular, this developed method focused on practical procedures involving the comparative analysis of paralogs and orthologs of genes in different plant species at different levels including phylogenetic analysis, nomenclature and classification, gene structure, molecular protein evolution, and duplication events as mechanisms of gene family expansion and synteny.