Classification and evolutionary analysis of pollen allergens / 中华微生物学和免疫学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To classify all the plant pollen allergens, each allergen sequence available was compared with protein family database. After that, the appearance and taxonomic distribution of each protein family could be known. When made reference to evolutionary analysis, a regular rule of the distribu-tion of all plant pollen allergens could be concluded. Methods Protein family memberships of each allergen were assigned by comparing the sequences with the Pfam database. Representative members of the most a-bundant pollen allergen families were compared with the Uniprot database using the BLAST server. Acces-sion number of all the interesting homologous could be obtained and all the sequence information could be ac-quired by Batch Entrez. Finally, the evolutionary trees were drawn with the help of MEGA4.0 software. Re-sults One hundred and sixty-eight pollen allergens were classified into 26 protein families. Profilins, pollen _allerg_1 and EF hands constituted the most abundant pollen allergen families. Profilins and EF hands oc-curred in almost all allergenic plant families, whereas allergenic Expansins, FAD_binding proteins, Amb_V allergens and Thaumatins were confined to single taxon. Conclusion It is concluded that the highly con-served sequences of allergens families such as Profilin may be one of the most important reasons of the cross reactivities in allergic diseases. The classification of pollen allergens may be helpful to clinical practice and basic research.