Dimerizing Eukaryotic Transcription Factor Family Evolution and Biological Complexity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Erich Bornberg-Bauer
• Subject Area: Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology
• Term: from 2006 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 31047451

Protein interactions are important for cellular organisation, for example for a range of dimerising eukaryotic transcription factors. The analysis of such regulatory complexes and the topological analysis of interaction networks are of practical relevance as they can help to understand disease-related disorders or, from a more theoretical point of view, the evolution of complex units in general. In previous work we have found that, contrary to earlier claims, hub-like networks with a scale-free behaviour may well evolve by series of single geneduplications with homo- and hetero-dimerising hubs being (descendants of) ancestral genes and peripheral, strictly heterodimerising proteins emerging later. Building on this work we now explore the generality of this phenomenon and want to understand the interplay of adaptive and neutral evolution on such networks. We first study further families known to homo- and heterodimerise, then develop and apply semi-automatic methods (e.g. tracing ) to identify more such families from a large dataset of genomes and interactomes by means of comparative analyses, study domain rearrangements and construct phylogenies. We will reconstruct the evolution of these networks (being subnetworks of wholeorganism interaction networks) and investigate the evolutionary pressure which has acted on the proteins.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants