Studying Evolutionary Dynamics of Gene Families Encoding SUMO-Activating Enzymes with SeaView and ProtTest

Molecular evolutionary analysis of gene families commonly involves a sequence of steps including multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and reconstructing phylogenetic trees, using any of the multiple algorithms available. SeaView is a multiplatform program that integrates different methods for performing the above tasks, and others, within a friendly and simple-to-use graphical user interface (Gouy et al. Mol Biol Evol 27(2):221-224, 2010). By using SeaView, we will investigate the evolutionary relationships among SAE1 genes in Brassicaceae species by means of two alternative methods of phylogenetic reconstruction: Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Neighbor-Joining (NJ). Prior to ML phylogenetic analysis (Guindon and Gascuel. Syst Biol 52(5):696-704, 2003), we will use ProtTest to select the best-fit evolutionary model of amino acid substitution for the MSA of SAE1 proteins (Abascal et al. Bioinformatics 21(9):2104-2105, 2005).