PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vasilis J. Promponas
AU  - Katerina R. Katsani
AU  - Benjamin J. Blencowe
AU  - Christos A. Ouzounis
TI  - Sequence evidence for common ancestry of eukaryotic endomembrane coatomers
AID  - 10.1101/020990
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 020990
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/16/020990.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/16/020990.full
AB  - Eukaryotic cells are defined by compartments through which the trafficking of macromolecules is mediated by large complexes, such as the nuclear pore, transport vesicles and intraflagellar transport. The assembly and maintenance of these complexes is facilitated by endomembrane coatomers, long suspected to be divergently related on the basis of structural and more recently phylogenomic analysis. By performing supervised walks in sequence space across coatomer superfamilies, we uncover subtle sequence patterns that have remained elusive to date, ultimately unifying eukaryotic coatomers by divergent evolution. The conserved residues shared by 3,502 endomembrane coatomer components are mapped onto the solenoid superhelix of nucleoporin and COPII protein structures, thus determining the invariant elements of coatomer architecture. This ancient structural motif can be considered as a universal signature connecting eukaryotic coatomers involved in multiple cellular processes across cell physiology and human disease.