Bioinformatic analysis of the rat genome

초록

Protein kinases play crucial roles in regulation of signaling pathways. In order to identify protein kinases in the rat genome, publicly accessible genetic sequence databases were searched and analysed. These searches yielded a catalog of 555 protein kinases and 45 protein kinase pseudogenes. At least 509 human protein kinases have rat orthologs, confirming rat as a model system for studying human protein kinases. Rat has almost all protein kinases as orthologous pairs that present in the mouse genome. Two hundred and seventy nine rat protein kinases contain 128 functional domains other than kinase domain and 268 rat protein kinases have a nuclear localization signal. Finally, a user-friendly web-based resource which consolidates the gene and protein annotations for all human, mouse and rat protein kinases has been developed.