RESUMO
A comparison of the most conserved sex-determining genes between the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was performed with bioinformatics tools developed for computational molecular biology. An initial set of protein sequences already described in the fruit fly as participants of the sex-determining cascade was retrieved from the Gene Ontology database (http://www.geneontology.org/) and aligned against a database of protein sequences predicted from the honey bee genome. The doublesex (dsx) gene is considered one of the most conserved sex-determining genes among metazoans, and a male-specific partial cDNA of putative A. mellifera dsx gene (Amdsx) was identified experimentally. The theoretical predictions were developed in the context of sequence similarity. Experimental evidence indicates that dsx is present in embryos and larvae, and that it encodes a transcription factor widely conserved in metazoans, containing a DM DNA-binding domain implicated in the regulation of the expression of genes involved in sexual phenotype formation.
Assuntos
Abelhas/genética , Biologia Computacional/métodos , Sequência Conservada/genética , Drosophila melanogaster/genética , Genes de Insetos/genética , Processos de Determinação Sexual , Animais , Proteínas de Ligação a DNA/genética , Proteínas de Drosophila/genética , Feminino , Masculino , Dados de Sequência Molecular , Reação em Cadeia da Polimerase , Análise de Sequência de DNA/métodosRESUMO
Dermatophytes, capable to use keratin of the host for nutrition, belong to one of the major groups of pathogenic fungi. Since dermatophytes are a closely related group they share various common features, and the morphology of isolates of a given species can be atypical, making species identification and differentiation even more difficult. Many methods have been explored in attempts to distinguish dermatophytes, but the combined use of different approaches for the investigation of the intraspecific and interspecific variability of Trichophyton continues to be scarce. Some studies have shown that amplified fragments of the small ribosomal DNA subunit 18S contains variable regions which can be used to discriminate between medically relevant yeast species, indicating that these regions could also be used for differentiation between dermatophytes. In our study, sequence analysis of the 18S-rDNA gene was combined with morphological and biochemical criteria in order to detect genetic differences between seven Trichophyton isolates and estimate their phylogenetic relationships. The results show that the isolates investigated belong to the Trichophyton group, which potentially contains the Trichophyton rubrum cluster.