Bioinformatical analysis of eukaryotic shugoshins reveals meiosis-specific features of vertebrate shugoshins.

Background: Shugoshins (SGOs) are proteins that protect cohesins located at the centromeres of sister chromatids from their early cleavage during mitosis and meiosis in plants, fungi, and animals. Their function is to prevent premature sister-chromatid disjunction and segregation. The study focused on the structural differences among SGOs acting during mitosis and meiosis that cause differences in chromosome behavior in these two types of cell division in different organisms.

Conservation and variability of synaptonemal complex proteins in phylogenesis of eukaryotes.

The problems of the origin and evolution of meiosis include the enigmatic variability of the synaptonemal complexes (SCs) which, being morphology similar, consist of different proteins in different eukaryotic phyla. Using bioinformatics methods, we monitored all available eukaryotic proteomes to find proteins similar to known SC proteins of model organisms. We found proteins similar to SC lateral element (LE) proteins and possessing the HORMA domain in the majority of the eukaryotic taxa and assume them the most ancient among all SC proteins.

In silico search for functionally similar proteins involved in meiosis and recombination in evolutionarily distant organisms.

Evolutionarily distant organisms have not only orthologs, but also nonhomologous proteins that build functionally similar subcellular structures. For instance, this is true with protein components of the synaptonemal complex (SC), a universal ultrastructure that ensures the successful pairing and recombination of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. We aimed at developing a method to search databases for genes that code for such nonhomologous but functionally analogous proteins.