Delving into Vertebrate Serpins for Understanding their Evolution

The superfamily of serine proteinase inhibitors (serpins) is involved in an array of fundamental biological processes such as blood coagulation, cell differentiation, cell migration, complement activation, embryo implantation, fibrinolysis, angiogenesis, and inflammation, and tumor suppression. Vertebrate serpins can be conveniently classified into six sub-groups, based on three independent biological features - genomic organization, diagnostic amino acid sites and rare indels. The present vertebrate serpins are derived from an original serpin most probably by intron insertion and we are trying to reconstruct the phylogeny of vertebrate serpin and looking for the reconstruction of original vertebrate gene(s). We started with fish genomes and characterized fish serpins and assigned orthology with respect to human serpins. Most fish serpins are characterised as stereotype vertebrate serpins with some interesting exceptions which suggest that either there are some fish-specific serpins or some fish serpins do not have human orthologs.

Presented at "BREW 2005":http://cmb.molgen.mpg.de/brew/program.html