International Journal of Molecular Sciences Article Origin and Evolution of the Human Bcl2-Associated Athanogene-1 (BAG-1) 1, 2, 1 1 1 Peter Nguyen y, Kyle Hess y , Larissa Smulders , Dat Le , Carolina Briseno , Christina M. Chavez 1 and Nikolas Nikolaidis 1,* 1 Center for Applied Biotechnology Studies, and Center for Computational and Applied Mathematics, Department of Biological Science, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA 92834-6850, USA;
[email protected] (P.N.);
[email protected] (L.S.);
[email protected] (D.L.);
[email protected] (C.B.);
[email protected] (C.M.C.) 2 Department of Genome Sciences, Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1-657-278-4526 These authors contributed equally to this work. y Received: 20 November 2020; Accepted: 17 December 2020; Published: 18 December 2020 Abstract: Molecular chaperones, particularly the 70-kDa heat shock proteins (Hsp70s), are key orchestrators of the cellular stress response. To perform their critical functions, Hsp70s require the presence of specific co-chaperones, which include nucleotide exchange factors containing the BCL2-associated athanogene (BAG) domain. BAG-1 is one of these proteins that function in a wide range of cellular processes, including apoptosis, protein refolding, and degradation, as well as tumorigenesis. However, the origin of BAG-1 proteins and their evolution between and within species are mostly uncharacterized. This report investigated the macro- and micro-evolution of BAG-1 using orthologous sequences and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to elucidate the evolution and understand how natural variation affects the cellular stress response.