title: Analysis of nucleotide substitutions and amino acid conservation in the Drosophila Adh genomic region.
abstract: The homologous genomic region that contains two paralogous genes, Adh and Adh-dup, was compared in several Drosophila species. Sequences were analyzed as follows: a) At the nucleotide level, Ka and Ks values were determined for each pair of species. Ka-Adh and Ka-Adh-dup are not significantly different. However, Ks-Adh values are significantly lower than Ks-Adh-dup, which are more variable. In agreement with other reports, lower Ks values for Adh correlate with a high level of gene expression and relatively high percentage of G+C content in the third codon position, while the opposite applies to Adh-dup. b) At the protein level, amino acid comparisons reveal conserved regions shared by ADH and ADH-DUP, which have been assigned to known functional domains. Key residues for dehydrogenasic function are also found in ADH-DUP, thus pointing to a dehydrogenase activity for ADH-DUP, albeit very different from that of ADH.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Genètica, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Albalat
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Marfany
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gonzàlez-Duarte
mesh_terms: D000426:Alcohol Dehydrogenase / Q000235:genetics*; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001482:Base Composition; D001483:Base Sequence; D004330:Drosophila / Q000201:enzymology / Q000235:genetics*; D017344:Genes, Insect; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D005810:Multigene Family; D009154:Mutation; D010802:Phylogeny; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D017385:Sequence Homology; D013045:Species Specificity
chemical_list: D000426:Alcohol Dehydrogenase