fairfolio
Saved Projects

The Urea Transporter (UT) Family: A Bioinformatic and Phylogenetic Analysis

CSEF · 2003 Biochemistry/ Molecular Biology

Ranjeet Minocha · La Jolla Country Day School, La Jolla

Overview

Objectives/Goals This experiment was undertaken in order to determine whether proteins of the Urea Transporter (UT) family are similar amongst different species, both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, and in addition, to trace evolutionary pathway of the protein. Methods/Materials This experiment was conducted using the following programs which analyze and look at the phlogeny and structure of the sequences:AveHAS,WHAT,IntraCompare (IC),TMS_ALIGN,BLAST Results Sequence, structural, and phylogenetic analyses reveal conserved regions and amino acid residues, suggesting that a primordial 5 trans-membrane helical segment (TMS)-encoding genetic element duplicated to give rise to a 10 TMS-encoding element early during evolutionary history, at about the time when eukaryotes diverged from prokaryotes. Two well conserved, strongly amphipathic, putative alpha-helices that precede both 5 TMS repeat elements are predicted to be of structural, functional, or biogenic significance. Further, a second duplication event (or a gene fusion event) occurred during development of the vertebrate lineage, giving rise to 20 TMS proteins in some mammals. These results suggest that vertebrates acquired UT genetic information from bacteria only once and that all current orthologues and paralogues in the animal kingdom arose from this one primordial system. Conclusions/Discussion The objective was met in that an evolutionary pathway was found and similarites of the UT protein family in different species was established. Using this same approach in a disease model can possibly help correct the malfunctioning part/s of the protein involved.

Summary statement

This project is concerned with the evolutionary pathway and similarities of the UT protein in the different species that it is expressed.

Help received

Used lab equipment at UCSD under Dr. Milton Saier; brother gave advice; students in lab helped with learning techniques; mom and dad for help with display

Competition history

  • CSEF 2003 Biochemistry/ Molecular Biology · Entry S0414

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google