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ISSN 1672-9145                                                Acta Biochim Biophys Sin 2005, 37(5): 341–348                                                   CN 31-1940/Q

Comparative Study of Apoptosis-related Gene Loci in Human, Mouse and Rat Genomes

Yan-Bin YIN, Yong ZHANG, Peng YU, Jing-Chu LUO, Ying JIANG*, and Song-Gang LI*

 

Center of Bioinformatics, National Laboratory of Genetic Engineering and Protein Engineering, College of Life Sciences,

Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

 

Abstract        Many genes are involved in mammalian cell apoptosis pathway. These apoptosis genes often contain characteristic functional domains, and can be classified into at least 15 functional groups, according to previous reports. Using an integrated bioinformatics platform for motif or domain search from three public mammalian proteomes (International Protein Index database for human, mouse, and rat), we systematically cataloged all of the proteins involved in mammalian apoptosis pathway. By localizing those proteins onto the genomes, we obtained a gene locus centric apoptosis gene catalog for human, mouse and rat. Further phylogenetic analysis showed that most of the apoptosis related gene loci are conserved among these three mammals. Interestingly, about one-third of apoptosis gene loci form gene clusters on mammal chromosomes, and exist in the three species, which indicated that mammalian apoptosis gene orders are also conserved. In addition, some tandem duplicated gene loci were revealed by comparing gene loci clusters­ in the three species. All data produced in this work were stored in a relational database and may be viewed at http://pcas.cbi.pku.edu.cn/database/apd.php.

 

Key words        apoptosis; gene cluster; comparative genomics; bioinformatics

 

 

 

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Received: December 30, 2004        Accepted: March 23, 2005

This work was supported by a grant from the National High Technology­ Research and Development Program of China (No. 2002AA231051)

*Corresponding authors:

Ying JIANG: Tel, 86-215-6521442; Fax, 86-10-62759001; E-mail, [email protected]

Song-Gang LI: Tel, 86-10-62756803; Fax, 86-10-62759001; E-mail, [email protected]