Article
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Molecular Evolution of RAMOSA1 (RA1) in Land Plants
Version 1
: Received: 9 April 2024 / Approved: 10 April 2024 / Online: 10 April 2024 (13:00:29 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Bellino, C.; Herrera, F.E.; Rodrigues, D.; Garay, A.S.; Huck, S.V.; Reinheimer, R. Molecular Evolution of RAMOSA1 (RA1) in Land Plants. Biomolecules 2024, 14, 550. Bellino, C.; Herrera, F.E.; Rodrigues, D.; Garay, A.S.; Huck, S.V.; Reinheimer, R. Molecular Evolution of RAMOSA1 (RA1) in Land Plants. Biomolecules 2024, 14, 550.
Abstract
RAMOSA1 (RA1) is a Cys2-His2-type (C2H2) zinc finger transcription factor that controls plant meristem fate and identity and has played an important role in maize domestication. Despite its importance, the origin of RA1 is unknown and the evolution in plants is partially understood. In this paper, we present a well resolved phylogeny based on 73 amino acid sequences from 48 embryophyte species. The recovered tree topology indicates that, during grass evolution, RA1 arose from two consecutive SUPERMAN duplications resulting in three distinct grass sequence lineages: RA1-like A, RA1-like B, and RA1; however, most of these copies have unknown functions. Our findings indicate that RA1 and RA1-like play roles in the nucleus despite lacking a traditional nuclear localization signal. Here we report that copies diversified their coding region and, with it, their protein structure, suggesting different patterns of DNA binding and protein-protein interaction. In addition, each of the retained copies diversified regulatory elements along their promoter regions, indicating differences in their upstream regulation. Taken together, we propose that the RA1 and RA1-like gene families in grasses may have undergone subfunctionalization and neofunctionalization enabled by gene duplication.
Keywords
zinc finger; embryophyte; phylogeny; paralogs; collinearity; nuclear localization; secondary structure; divergent motifs; promoter
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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