Genome-wide comparison of ferritin family from Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya, and Viruses: its distribution, characteristic motif, and phylogenetic relationship

Abstract

Ferritins are highly conserved proteins that are widely distributed in various species from archaea to humans. The ubiquitous characteristic of these proteins reflects the pivotal contribution of ferritins to the safe storage and timely delivery of iron to achieve iron homeostasis. This study investigated the ferritin genes in 248 genomes from various species, including viruses, archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. The distribution comparison suggests that mammals and eudicots possess abundant ferritin genes, whereas fungi contain very few ferritin genes. Archaea and bacteria show considerable numbers of ferritin genes. Generally, prokaryotes possess three types of ferritin (the typical ferritin, bacterioferritin, and DNA-binding protein from starved cell), whereas eukaryotes have various subunit types of ferritin, thereby indicating the individuation of the ferritin family during evolution. The characteristic motif analysis of ferritins suggested that all key residues specifying the unique structural motifs of ferritin are highly conserved across three domains of life. Meanwhile, the characteristic motifs were also distinguishable between ferritin groups, especially phytoferritins, which show a plant-specific motif. The phylogenetic analyses show that ferritins within the same subfamily or subunits are generally clustered together. The phylogenetic relationships among ferritin members suggest that both gene duplication and horizontal transfer contribute to the wide variety of ferritins, and their possible evolutionary scenario was also proposed. The results contribute to a better understanding of the distribution, characteristic motif, and evolutionary relationship of the ferritin family.

Ferritin, cellular iron storage and regulation

“…FTN includes the classical ferritin H‐chain (FtH) with ferroxidase activity, the ferritin L‐Chain (FtL) found only in animals and the rare mitochondrial ferritin FtMt. A recent study investigated the ferritin genes in the genome of 248 organisms that included viruses, bacteria, archea, and eukarya . Ferritin genes were also found in some viruses, probably originating from horizontal transfer from the host.…”

Ferritin Assembly in Enterocytes of Drosophila melanogaster

“…Despite the differences between the subcellular accumulation of ferritin: in the cytosol of vertebrates [ 33 ], in the chloroplasts of plants [ 34 ] and in the secretory pathway of many insect ferritins (for insects with cytosolic ferritins see [ 4 ] and also the ferritin sequences of Rhodnius prolixus [ 35 ]), strong evolutionary links exist between ferritins from prokaryotes and archaea to eukaryotes [ 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. In particular, the mechanism of iron mineralization in assembled ferritins is highly conserved [ 38 , 39 , 40 ].…”

Agrobacterium tumefaciens ferritins play an important role in full virulence through regulating iron homeostasis and oxidative stress survival

“…Prokaryotes show considerable numbers of ferritin genes (Bai et al, 2015). Some bacteria contain all three types of ferritin: Ftn, Bfr, and Dps (Rivera, 2017;Sharma and Bisht, 2017), but A. tumefaciens only has two types of ferritin and one copy of the gene for each ferritin.…”

“…Dps proteins usually bind DNA nonspecifically to protect it from harmful hydroxyl radicals produced by the Fenton reaction (Andrews, 2010;Theil et al, 2013). In many cases, all three ferritin-like proteins can coexist in the same bacterium (Bai et al, 2015;Sharma and Bisht, 2017). Unlike many bacteria, the genome of A. tumefaciens C58 carries only two genes that are predicted to encode the ferritin-like proteins.…”