We describe the draft genome of the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex, which is only 200 Mb and contains at least 30,907 genes. The high gene count is a consequence of an elevated rate of gene duplication resulting in tandem gene clusters. More than 1/3 of Daphnia’s genes have no detectable homologs in any other available proteome, and the most amplified gene families are specific to the Daphnia lineage. The co-expansion of gene families interacting within metabolic pathways suggests that the maintenance of duplicated genes is not random, and the analysis of gene expression under different environmental conditions reveals that numerous paralogs acquire divergent expression patterns soon after duplication. Daphnia-specific genes – including many additional loci within sequenced regions that are otherwise devoid of annotations – are the most responsive genes to ecological challenges.

TIGRFAMs, available online at http://www.jcvi.org/tigrfams is a database of protein family definitions. Each entry features a seed alignment of trusted representative sequences, a hidden Markov model (HMM) built from that alignment, cutoff scores that let automated annotation pipelines decide which proteins are members, and annotations for transfer onto member proteins. Most TIGRFAMs models are designated equivalog, meaning they assign a specific name to proteins conserved in function from a common ancestral sequence. Models describing more functionally heterogeneous families are designated subfamily or domain, and assign less specific but more widely applicable annotations. The Genome Properties database, available at http://www.jcvi.org/genome-properties, specifies how computed evidence, including TIGRFAMs HMM results, should be used to judge whether an enzymatic pathway, a protein complex or another type of molecular subsystem is encoded in a genome. TIGRFAMs and Genome Properties content are developed in concert because subsystems reconstruction for large numbers of genomes guides selection of seed alignment sequences and cutoff values during protein family construction. Both databases specialize heavily in bacterial and archaeal subsystems. At present, 4284 models appear in TIGRFAMs, while 628 systems are described by Genome Properties. Content derives both from subsystem discovery work and from biocuration of the scientific literature.

Numerous eukaryotic proteins contain multiple domains. Certain domains show a tendency to occur in diverse domain architectures and can be considered "promiscuous." These promiscuous domains are, typically, involved in protein-protein interactions and play crucial roles in interaction networks, particularly those that contribute to signal transduction. A systematic comparative-genomic analysis of promiscuous domains in eukaryotes is described. Two quantitative measures of domain promiscuity are introduced and applied to the analysis of 28 genomes of diverse eukaryotes. Altogether, 215 domains are identified as strongly promiscuous. The fraction of promiscuous domains in animals is shown to be significantly greater than that in fungi or plants. Evolutionary reconstructions indicate that domain promiscuity is a volatile, relatively fast-changing feature of eukaryotic proteins, with few domains remaining promiscuous throughout the evolution of eukaryotes. Some domains appear to have attained promiscuity independently in different lineages, for example, animals and plants. It is proposed that promiscuous domains persist within a relatively small pool of evolutionarily stable domain combinations from which numerous rare architectures emerge during evolution. Domain promiscuity positively correlates with the number of experimentally detected domain interactions and with the strength of purifying selection affecting a domain. Thus, evolution of promiscuous domains seems to be constrained by the diversity of their interaction partners. The set of promiscuous domains is enriched for domains mediating protein-protein interactions that are involved in various forms of signal transduction, especially in the ubiquitin system and in chromatin. Thus, a limited repertoire of promiscuous domains makes a major contribution to the diversity and evolvability of eukaryotic proteomes and signaling networks.

Data mining methods in bioinformatics and comparative genomics commonly rely on working definitions of protein families from prior computation. Partial phylogenetic profiling (PPP), by contrast, optimizes family sizes during its searches for the cooccurring protein families that serve different roles in the same biological system. In a large-scale investigation of the incredibly diverse radical S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzyme superfamily, PPP aided in building a collection of 68 TIGRFAMs hidden Markov models (HMMs) that define nonoverlapping and functionally distinct subfamilies. Many identify radical SAM enzymes as molecular markers for multicomponent biological systems; HMMs defining their partner proteins also were constructed. Newly found systems include five groupings of protein families in which at least one marker is a radical SAM enzyme while another, encoded by an adjacent gene, is a short peptide predicted to be its substrate for posttranslational modification. The most prevalent, in over 125 genomes, featuring a peptide that we designate SCIFF (six cysteines in forty-five residues), is conserved throughout the class Clostridia, a distribution inconsistent with putative bacteriocin activity. A second novel system features a tandem pair of putative peptidemodifying radical SAM enzymes associated with a highly divergent family of peptides in which the only clearly conserved feature is a run of His-Xaa-Ser repeats. A third system pairs a radical SAM domain peptide maturase with selenocysteine-containing targets, suggesting a new biological role for selenium. These and several additional novel maturases that cooccur with predicted target peptides share a C-terminal additional 4Fe4S-binding domain with PqqE, the subtilosin A maturase AlbA, and the predicted mycofactocin and Nif11-class peptide maturases as well as with activators of anaerobic sulfatases and quinohemoprotein amine dehydrogenases. Radical SAM enzymes with this additional domain, as detected by TIGR04085, significantly outnumber lantibiotic synthases and cyclodehydratases combined in reference genomes while being highly enriched for members whose apparent targets are small peptides. Interpretation of comparative genomics evidence suggests unexpected (nonbacteriocin) roles for natural products from several of these systems.