Evolutionary expansion and structural functionalism of the ancient family of profilin proteins

Abstract

Structure and functional similarities of a recent protein's orthologs with its ancient counterpart are largely determined by the configuration of evolutionary preservation of amino acids. The emergence of genome sequencing databases allowed dissecting the evolutionarily important gene families at a comprehensive and genome-wide scale. The profilin multi-gene family is an ancient, universal, and functionally diverged across kingdoms, which regulates various aspects of cellular development in both prokarya and eukarya, especially cell-wall maintenance through actin sequestering, nucleation and cytokinesis. We performed a meta-analysis of the evolutionary expansion, structural conservation, evolution of function motifs, and transcriptional biases of profilin proteins across kingdoms. An exhaustive search of various genome databases of cyanobacteria, fungi, animalia and plantae kingdoms revealed 172 paralogous/orthologous profilins those were phylogenetically clustered in various groups. Orthologous gene comparisons indicated that segmental and tandem duplication events under strong purifying selection are predominantly responsible for their convoluted structural divergences. Evidently, structural divergences were more prevalent in the paralogs than orthologs, and evolutionary variations in the exon/intron architecture were accomplished by 'exon/intron-gain' and insertion/deletion during sequence-exonization. Remarkably, temporal expression evolution of profilin paralogs/homeologs during cotton fiber domestication provides evolutionary impressions of the selection of highly diverged transcript abundance notably in the fiber morpho-evolution. These results provide global insights into the profilin evolution, their structural design across taxa; and their future utilization in translational research.

Keywords: Exon/intron organization; Expression evolution; Kingdoms; Profilin evolution; Structural divergences.