Worm Breeder's Gazette 17(2): 20 (April 1, 2002)

These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.

Rab gene nomenclature

Michael L. Nonet

Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis MO 63110

Rab genes are a large family of small GTPases that regulate vesicular trafficking in cells. In vertebrates around 60 Rab genes have been identified. C. elegans contains at least 28 Rab genes. Since the identification of vertebrate Rabs is now essentially complete, it is now possible to relatively confidently define the vertebrate homolog of most C. elegans Rab genes (Pereira-Leal and Seabra. 2001 J. Mol. Biol. 313 889-901). At the request of Jonathan Hodgkin, I have now assigned formal names to the 22 Rab genes for which a clear vertebrate homolog can be identified. Six remaining putative Rab genes have not been assigned names. The assignments were made using the analysis of Pereira-Leal and Seabra as a foundation. I then confirmed that the predicted coding regions were very likely accurate by identifying the C. briggsae homolog (which in most cases is >95% identical to the C. elegans protein). This analysis revealed that several of the predicted Rab sequences in the database are incorrect (specifically, rab-8, rab-33 and rab-39). The rab-28 gene structure remains questionable as the gene is longer than most Rab genes by 25 amino acids and the N-terminal region is much less highly conserved than the rest of the gene. However, the proper structure is not obvious from my analysis. A table compiling general information on the protein sequences of both C. elegans and C. briggsae Rab homologs, representative cDNAs, and accession numbers for both genomic and protein sequences is available at http://thalamus.wustl.edu/nonetlab/NMimages/genedatafold/Rabgenes.html