BMC Microbiology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Phylogenomics and signature proteins for the alpha Proteobacteria and its main groups Radhey S Gupta* and Amy Mok Address: Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Science, McMaster University, Hamilton L8N3Z5, Canada Email: Radhey S Gupta* -
[email protected]; Amy Mok -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 28 November 2007 Received: 20 July 2007 Accepted: 28 November 2007 BMC Microbiology 2007, 7:106 doi:10.1186/1471-2180-7-106 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2180/7/106 © 2007 Gupta and Mok; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Alpha proteobacteria are one of the largest and most extensively studied groups within bacteria. However, for these bacteria as a whole and for all of its major subgroups (viz. Rhizobiales, Rhodobacterales, Rhodospirillales, Rickettsiales, Sphingomonadales and Caulobacterales), very few or no distinctive molecular or biochemical characteristics are known. Results: We have carried out comprehensive phylogenomic analyses by means of Blastp and PSI- Blast searches on the open reading frames in the genomes of several α-proteobacteria (viz. Bradyrhizobium japonicum, Brucella suis, Caulobacter crescentus, Gluconobacter oxydans, Mesorhizobium loti, Nitrobacter winogradskyi, Novosphingobium aromaticivorans, Rhodobacter sphaeroides 2.4.1, Silicibacter sp. TM1040, Rhodospirillum rubrum and Wolbachia (Drosophila) endosymbiont). These studies have identified several proteins that are distinctive characteristics of all α-proteobacteria, as well as numerous proteins that are unique repertoires of all of its main orders (viz.