MARK2
Microtubule associated regulating kinase 2
Multiple Sequence Alignment
Multiple sequence alignment is carried out to align and compare the FASTA sequences of the MARK2 homologues in 5 species – Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Xenopus laevis, Rattus norvegicus and Bos taurus. Clustal Omega, which is a multiple sequence alignment program for proteins, is used. It uses seeded guide trees and HMM profile-profile techniques to generate alignments between three or more sequences [1]. From the output, conserved domains are identified.
The results of the multiple sequence alignment for the five different species are presented below. Three conserved domains are inferred – kinase domain, UBA domain and kinase associated domain. The kinase domain is highlighted in green, the UBA domain in blue and the kinase associated domain in pink.
The regions that are highlighted are conserved across the five species, while regions that are not highlighted are not conserved. The FASTA sequences are highly conserved overall. Although the FASTA sequence of Xenopus laevis is less conserved than the FASTA sequences of the other species in some regions, these less conserved regions are not within the domains identified (i.e the kinase domain, the UBA domain and the kinase-associated domain). The FASTA sequences of the kinase domain, UBA domain and the kinase-associated domain are highly conserved across the five species, suggesting that these domains are important for the function of MARK2, which is similar across the five species.
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