Testing robustness of relative complexity measure method constructing robust phylogenetic trees for Galanthus L. using the relative complexity measure.

BACKGROUND: Most phylogeny analysis methods based on molecular sequences use multiple alignment where the quality of the alignment, which is dependent on the alignment parameters, determines the accuracy of the resulting trees. Different parameter combinations chosen for the multiple alignment may result in different phylogenies. A new non-alignment based approach, Relative Complexity Measure (RCM), has been introduced to tackle this problem and proven to work in fungi and mitochondrial DNA. RESULT: In this work, we present an application of the RCM method to reconstruct robust phylogenetic trees using sequence data for genus Galanthus obtained from different regions in Turkey. Phylogenies have been analyzed using nuclear and chloroplast DNA sequences. Results showed that, the tree obtained from nuclear ribosomal RNA gene sequences was more robust, while the tree obtained from the chloroplast DNA showed a higher degree of variation. CONCLUSIONS: Phylogenies generated by Relative Complexity Measure were found to be robust and results of RCM were more reliable than the compared techniques. Particularly, to overcome MSA-based problems, RCM seems to be a reasonable way and a good alternative to MSA-based phylogenetic analysis. We believe our method will become a mainstream phylogeny construction method especially for the highly variable sequence families where the accuracy of the MSA heavily depends on the alignment parameters.

Temperature dependence of accuracy of DNA polymerase I from Geobacillus anatolicus.

Klenow-like DNA polymerase I fragment from Geobacillus anatolicus (GF) was cloned and purified. The accuracy of GF was measured in vitro at three different temperatures under single turnover conditions as well as using a forward mutation assay. In pre-steady-state kinetic measurements, when temperature was raised from 22 °C to 50 °C, the rate (k(pol)) for cognate dTTP and non-cognate dATP nucleotide incorporations increased six- and four-fold, respectively, whereas the K(d) for both nucleotide incorporations changed only slightly. As a result, the error frequency was remained constant (∼4 × 10(-4)) over this temperature range. The accuracy of GF was also measured using a forward mutation assay during a single cycle of DNA synthesis of the lacZα complementation gene in M13mp2 DNA. In this assay, which scores various types of replication errors, mutant frequency of GF was 5 × 10(-3) at 72 °C which is four-fold higher than that of 37 °C.

Cloning and sequence analysis of novel DNA polymerases from thermophilic Geobacillus species isolated from hot springs in Turkey: characterization of a DNA polymerase I from Geobacillus kaue strain NB.

The complete coding sequences of the polA genes from seven thermophilic Geobacillus species, isolated from hot springs of Gönen and Hisaralan in Turkey, were cloned and sequenced. The polA genes of these Geobacillus species contain a long open reading frame of 2,637 bp encoding DNA polymerase I with a calculated molecular mass of 99 kDa. Amino acid sequences of these Geobacillus DNA polymerases are closely related. The multiple sequence alignments show all include the conserved amino acids in the polymerase and 5'-3' exonuclease domains, but the catalytic residues varied in 3'-5' exonuclease domain of these Geobacillus DNA polymerases. One of them, DNA polymerase I from Geobacillus kaue strain NB (Gkaue polI) is purified to homogeneity and biochemically characterized in vitro. The optimum temperature for enzymatic activity of Gkaue polI is 70 °C at pH 7.5-8.5 in the presence of 8 mM Mg(2+) and 80-100 mM of monovalent ions. The addition of polyamines stimulates the polymerization activity of the enzyme. Three-dimensional structure of Gkaue polI predicted using homology modeling confirmed the conservation of all the functionally important regions in the polymerase active site.