Abstract
An analysis of nuclear-encoded oxidative phosphorylation genes in Drosophila and Anopheles reveals that pairs of duplicated genes have strikingly different expression patterns.
Highlights
In eukaryotic cells, oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) uses the products of both nuclear and mitochondrial genes to generate cellular ATP
On the basis of comparative evidence obtained by BLASTP analysis, 78 of these genes are involved in the OXPHOS system, encoding 66 proteins known to be components of the five large respiratory complexes and 12 proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation as accessory proteins
The comparative analysis of the 78 OXPHOS genes in the three dipteran species shows a high level of amino-acid sequence identity, as well as a substantial conservation of intron-exon structure, indicating that these genes are under strong selective constraints
Summary
Oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) uses the products of both nuclear and mitochondrial genes to generate cellular ATP. Interspecies comparative analysis of these genes, which appear to be under strong functional constraints, may shed light on the evolutionary mechanisms that act on a set of genes correlated by function and subcellular localization of their products. Http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/2/R11 localization of their products, intra- and interspecies comparative analyses can be especially efficient tools to obtain information on the functional constraints acting on the evolution of the gene set and on the mechanisms regulating its coordinate expression. A set of genes present in all eukaryotic genomes and expected to be subject to peculiar evolutionary constraints is represented by the genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), the primary energy-producing process in all aerobic organisms [5]. Except for complex II, which is formed by four proteins encoded by nuclear genes, the other respiratory complexes depend on both mitochondrial and nuclear genomes; so, assembling the OXPHOS complexes and fine tuning their activity to satisfy cell- and tissuespecific energy demands requires specialized regulatory mechanisms and evolutionary strategies to optimize the cross-talk between the two genomes and ensure the coordinated expression of their relevant products
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