1. Bioinformatic and molecular characterization of beta-defensins-like peptides isolated from the green lizard Anolis carolinensis.
- Author
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Dalla Valle L, Benato F, Maistro S, Quinzani S, and Alibardi L
- Subjects
- Alternative Splicing, Amino Acid Motifs genetics, Amino Acid Sequence, Animals, Cloning, Molecular, Computational Biology, Exons genetics, Expressed Sequence Tags, Genome, Immunity, Innate, Molecular Sequence Data, Phylogeny, Sequence Alignment, Sequence Homology, Amino Acid, Snakes, beta-Defensins immunology, beta-Defensins metabolism, Crotalid Venoms genetics, Lizards, beta-Defensins genetics
- Abstract
The high resistance of lizards to infections indicates that anti-microbial peptides may be involved. Through the analysis of the green lizard (Anolis carolinensis) genome and the expressed sequence tag (EST) libraries 32 beta-defensin-like-peptides have been identified. The level of expression of some of these genes in different tissues has been determined by semi-quantitative RT-PCR. Gene expression and structure analysis suggest the presence of alternative splicing mechanisms, with a number of exons ranging from two to four, similar to that for beta-defensins genes in mammals. Lizard beta-defensin-like peptides present the characteristic cysteine-motif identified in mammalian and avian beta-defensins. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that some lizard beta-defensins-like peptides are related to crotamine and crotamin-like peptides of snakes and lizards suggesting that beta-defensins and venomous peptides have a common ancestor gene., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
- Published
- 2012
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