title: The major facilitator superfamily.
abstract: In 1998 we updated earlier descriptions of the largest family of secondary transport carriers found in living organisms, the major facilitator superfamily (MFS). Seventeen families of transport proteins were shown to comprise this superfamily. We here report expansion of the MFS to include 29 established families as well as five probable families. Structural, functional, and mechanistic features of the constituent permeases are described, and each newly identified family is shown to exhibit specificity for a single class of substrates. Phylogenetic analyses define the evolutionary relationships of the members of each family to each other, and multiple alignments allow definition of family-specific signature sequences as well as all well-conserved sequence motifs. The work described serves to update previous publications and allows extrapolation of structural, functional and mechanistic information obtained with any one member of the superfamily to other members with limitations determined by the degrees of sequence divergence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0116, USA. saier@ucsd.edu
authors.forename: M H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Saier
authors.forename: J T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Beatty
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Goffeau
authors.forename: K T
authors.initials: KT
authors.lastname: Harley
authors.forename: W H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Heijne
authors.forename: S C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: D L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Jack
authors.forename: P S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Jähn
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lew
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: S S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Pao
authors.forename: I T
authors.initials: IT
authors.lastname: Paulsen
authors.forename: T T
authors.initials: TT
authors.lastname: Tseng
authors.forename: P S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Virk
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D002352:Carrier Proteins / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data
chemical_list: D002352:Carrier Proteins