Re-examination of chimp protein kinases suggests "novel architectures" are gene prediction artifacts

Anamika et al recently published in this journal a sequence alignment analysis of protein kinases encoded by the chimpanzee genome in comparison to those in the human genome. From this analysis they concluded that several chimpanzee kinases have unusual domain arrangements.

Re-examination of these kinases reveals claimed novel arrangements cannot withstand scrutiny; each is either not novel or represents over-analysis of weakly confident computer generated gene models. Additional sequence evidence available at the time of the paper's submission either directly contradict the gene models or suggest alternate gene models. These alternate models would minimize or eliminate the observed differences between human and chimp kinases.

None of the proposed novel chimpanzee kinase architectures are supported by experiment evidence. Guidelines to prevent such erroneous conclusions in similar papers are proposed.