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Welcome to the Plant Specific Database.
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What makes a plant different from other organisms?To answer this question it is important to understand both what is similar between plants and other organisms and also what are the differences. Although many studies are based upon sequence similarities between genes in different species, suprisingly few studies have been reported that focus on the genome-wide differences between plants and organisms that belong to other phylogenetic lineages. In an effort to shed light into this important question in plant biology, we have classified Arabidopsis protein-coding genes based on their pattern of sequence similarity to protein sequences of organisms that belong to the three domains of life (Eukaryota, Bacteria and Archea). This classification allowed the identification of 3848 Arabidopsis genes that encode putative plant-specific proteins, as similar protein sequences were only found in other plant species. Plant-specific proteins are likely to play important roles in processes that are unique and of significance to plants. Hence the study of their functions should greatly contribute to plant biology and to the understanding of how plants differ from other organisms. However, we found that many plant-specific proteins have unknown functions. To facilitate the functional characterization of plant-specific proteins, we have compiled and integrated information from multiple public databases (e.g. TIGR, MIPS, TAIR, SIGNAL), as well as provide results obtained with predictive algorithms (e.g. TargetP, TMHMM, BLASTCLUST). We also provide flexible search capabilities that should allow the analysis of single as well as lists of proteins of interest to individual researchers.
In addition to plant-specific proteins, we have also identified 5132 other Arabidopsis proteins that exhibit specific patterns of conservation across the three domains of life. We have classified these proteins in nine groups (below) according to the organisms in which we found similar protein sequences.
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Click to see a list of Arabidopsis proteins found in:A total of 8980 Arabidopsis protein sequences are presented in this database, as plant-specific or in some of the other groups described above (click for a chart of the classification). More than half of the Arabidopsis proteins were not classified in this study. This number is largely explained by the stringent and conservative criteria we favored to define each of the categories. |