title: Plant cytosine-5 DNA methyltransferases: structure, function, and molecular evolution.
abstract: A detailed analysis of the structure and function, along with evolutionary aspects, of the main plant cytosine-5 DNA methyltransferases (C5-MTases) is presented. The evolutionary relationships between the already known and four candidate plant C5-MTases identified in this work were investigated using the distance, maximum-parsimony, and maximum-likelihood approaches. The topologies of the trees were overall congruent: four monophyletic groups corresponding to the four plant C5-MTase families were clearly distinguished. In addition, sequence analyses of the plant C5-MTase target recognition domain sequences were performed and phylogenetic trees were reconstructed showing that there is good conservation among but not within the plant C5-MTase families. Furthermore, a conserved dipeptide that plays an important role in flipping the target base into the catalytic site of the C5-MTases was identified in all plant C5-MTases under study.
authors: Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, Department of Biotechnology, Bioinformatics & Medical Informatics Team, Soranou Efesiou 4, 11527 Athens, Greece.
authors: Athanasia
authors: A
authors: Pavlopoulou
authors: Sophia
authors: S
authors: Kossida
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D004248:DNA (Cytosine-5-)-Methyltransferases / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D017343:Genes, Plant; D008954:Models, Biological; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
chemical_list: D004248:DNA (Cytosine-5-)-Methyltransferases