The sea urchin kinome: a first look.

This paper reports a preliminary in silico analysis of the sea urchin kinome. The predicted protein kinasesin the sea urchingenome were identified, annotated and classified, according to both function and kinasedomain taxonomy. The results show that the sea urchin kinome, consisting of 353 protein kinases, is closer to the Drosophila kinome(239) than the human kinome(518) with respect to total kinasenumber. However, the diversity of sea urchin kinasesis surprisingly similar to humans, since the urchin kinomeis missing only 4 of 186 human subfamilies, while Drosophila lacks 24. Thus, the sea urchin kinomecombines the simplicity of a non-duplicated genome with the diversity of function and signaling previously considered to be vertebrate-specific. More than half of the sea urchin kinasesare involved with signal transduction, and approximately 88% of the signaling kinasesare expressed in the developing embryo. These results support the strength of this nonchordate deuterostomeas a pivotal developmental and evolutionary model organism.