Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 2, 2025

Demonstration of the Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility Tool for Rapid Assessment of Protein Conservation
Published on: February 10, 2023
Conserved Signatures in Protein Sequences Reliably Demarcate Different Clades of Rodents/Glires Species and
Radhey S Gupta1, Carson Suggett1
1Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8N 3Z5, Canada.
Abstract:
The grandorder Glires, consisting of the orders Rodentia and Lagomorpha, encompasses a significant portion of the extant mammalian species including Rat, Mouse, Squirrel, Guinea pig and Beaver. Glires species play an important role in the ecosystem and provide valuable animal models for genetic studies and animal testing. Thus, it is important to reliably determine their evolutionary relationships and identify molecular characteristics that are specific for different species groups within the Glires. In this work, we have constructed a phylogenetic tree for >30 genome sequenced Glires species based on concatenated sequences of 25 conserved proteins. In this tree, members of different orders, suborders, and families within Glires formed strongly supported clades, and their interrelationships were also generally reliably resolved. In parallel, we conducted comparative analyses on more than 1500 protein sequences from Glires species to identify highly conserved molecular markers. These markers were comprised of conserved signature indels (CSIs) in proteins, which are specific for different Rodentia/Glires clades. Of the 41 novel CSIs identified in this work, some are specific for the entire Glires, Rodentia, or Lagomorpha clades, whereas many others reliably demarcate different family/suborder level clades of Rodentia (viz. Myomorpha, Castorimorpha, Sciuromorpha, Hystricomorpha, and Muroidea). Additionally, some of the CSIs also provide information regarding the interrelationships among Rodentia subgroups. Our analysis has also identified one CSI that is commonly shared by the Glires and Scandentia species (tree shrew), however, its evolutionary significance is unclear. Several of the identifed rodents-specific CSIs are present in conserved disease-related proteins. Thus, they provide novel molecular markers for genetic and biochemical studies on the functions of these proteins.
Related Concept Videos
Multi-species Conserved Sequences
Although the genome of each species varies greatly from each other, a few sequences are highly conserved. Such conserved...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Conserved Binding Sites
Binding sites are often located in large pockets, and if their location on a protein’s surface is unknown, it can be predicted using various approaches. The energetic method computationally...
Conservation of Protein Domains Over Different Proteins
A limited set of protein domains often duplicate and recombine during evolution. These domains can be organized in different combinations to...
Phylogeny

