Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹College of Applied Medical Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; ²Queens Hospital, Burton Hospitals NHS Trust, Burton On Trent, Staffordshire, UK; ³Stapenhill Medical Centre, Burton On Trent, Staffordshire, UK; ⁴Janaki Nagar, Tolichowki, Hyderabad, India.

Email

afzalshaik@gmail.com; *Corresponding authors

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received November 25, 2012; Accepted November 26, 2012; Published January 09, 2013

Cubilin, (CUBN; also known as intrinsic factor-cobalamin receptor [Homo sapiens Entrez Pubmed ref NM_001081.3; NG_008967.1; GI: 119606627]), located in the epithelium of intestine and kidney acts as a receptor for intrinsic factor – vitamin B12 complexes. Mutations in CUBN may play a role in autosomal recessive megaloblastic anemia. The current study investigated the possible role of CUBN in evolution using phylogenetic testing. A total of 588 BLAST hits were found for the cubilin query sequence and these hits showed putative conserved domain, CUB superfamily (as on 27th Nov 2012). A first-pass phylogenetic tree was constructed to identify the taxa which most often contained the CUBN sequences. Following this, we narrowed down the search by manually deleting sequences which were not CUBN. A repeat phylogenetic analysis of 25 taxa was performed using PhyML, RAxML and TreeDyn softwares to confirm that CUBN is a conserved protein emphasizing its importance as an extracellular domain and being present in proteins mostly known to be involved in development in many chordate taxa but not found in prokaryotes, plants and yeast.. No horizontal gene transfers have been found between different taxa.

Keywords

Cubilin, CUBN, Amino acid sequences, Phylogeny, Sequence alignment.

Citation

Shaik et al. Bioinformation 9(1): 029-036 (2013)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.