The evolutionary relationship of the domain architectures in the RhoGEF-containing proteins

Domain insertions and deletions lead to variations in the domain architectures of the proteins from their common ancestor. In this work, we investigated four groups of the RhoGEF-containing proteins from different organisms with domain architectures RhoGEF-PH-SH3, SH3-RhoGEF-PH, RhoGEF-PH, and SH3-RhoGEF defined in the Pfam database. The phylogenetic trees were constructed using each individual domain and/or the combinations of all the domains. The phylogenetic analysis suggests that RhoGEF-PH-SH3 and SH3-RhoGEF-PH might have evolved from RhoGEF-PH through the insertion of SH3 independently, while SH3- RhoGEF of proteins in fruit fly might have evolved from SH3-RhoGEF-PH by the degeneration of PH domain.