STEPWISE ORIGIN AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSIFICATION OF THE AFL SUBFAMILY B3 GENES DURING LAND PLANT EVOLUTION
The AFL genes (ABI3/VP1, FUS3 and LEC2) belong to the plant-speci.c B3 superfamily, playing important roles in regulating seed development and maturation. It is unclear, however, whether these genes appeared at the same time as the origin of seed plants and if all these genes are necessary and su.cient for seed development for all seed plants. By conducting a genome-wide comparative analysis of the putative AFL genes in various plant species, we found that the ABI3 homologous genes existed in all land plant genomes, but the FUS3 homologous were present only in seed plant genomes and the LEC2-like sequences only in dicot genomes. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that the AFL genes had undergone successive rounds of gene duplication and subsequent diversi-cation during land plant evolution, resulting in the stepwise origin of the ABI3, FUS3 and LEC2 genes. Comparison of gene structure of the AFL genes revealed a trend of decreasing in the number of conserved domains from ABI3 to FUS3 and LEC2.
AFL B3 genes genome-wide comparative analysis stepwise origin functional
YANG LI KE JIN ZHU ZHU JI YANG
Center for Evolutionary Biology School of Life Science, Fudan University Shanghai 200433, P. R. China
国际会议
上海
英文
212-224
2010-12-06（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）