BMC Plant Biology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Phylogenetic analysis, subcellular localization, and expression patterns of RPD3/HDA1 family histone deacetylases in plants Malona V Alinsug, Chun-Wei Yu and Keqiang Wu* Address: Institute of Plant Biology, College of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Email: Malona V Alinsug -
[email protected]; Chun-Wei Yu -
[email protected]; Keqiang Wu* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 28 March 2009 Received: 26 November 2008 Accepted: 28 March 2009 BMC Plant Biology 2009, 9:37 doi:10.1186/1471-2229-9-37 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2229/9/37 © 2009 Alinsug et al; 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: Although histone deacetylases from model organisms have been previously identified, there is no clear basis for the classification of histone deacetylases under the RPD3/ HDA1 superfamily, particularly on plants. Thus, this study aims to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree to determine evolutionary relationships between RPD3/HDA1 histone deacetylases from six different plants representing dicots with Arabidopsis thaliana, Populus trichocarpa, and Pinus taeda, monocots with Oryza sativa and Zea mays, and the lower plants with Physcomitrella patens. Results: Sixty two histone deacetylases of RPD3/HDA1 family from the six plant species were phylogenetically analyzed to determine corresponding orthologues. Three clusters were formed separating Class I, Class II, and Class IV.