Tracing the origin of the compensasome: evolutionary history of DEAH helicase and MYST acetyltransferase gene families.

Dosage compensation in Drosophila is mediated by a complex of proteins and RNAs called the "compensasome." Two of the genes that encode proteins of the complex, maleless (mle) and males-absent-on-the-first (mof), respectively, belong to the DEAH helicase and MYST acetyltransferase gene families. We performed comprehensive phylogenetic and structural analyses to determine the evolutionary histories of these two gene families and thus to better understand the origin of the compensasome. All of the members of the DEAH and MYST families of the completely sequenced Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans genomes, as well as those so far (June 2000) found in Drosophila melanogaster (for which the euchromatic part of the genome has also been fully sequenced) and Homo sapiens, were analyzed. We describe a total of 39 DEAH helicases in these four species. Almost all of them can be grouped in just three main branches. The first branch includes the yeast PRP2, PRP16, PRP22, and PRP43 splicing factors and their orthologs in animal species. Each PRP gene has a single ortholog in metazoans. The second branch includes just four genes, found in yeast (Ecm16) and Drosophila (kurz) and their orthologs in humans and Caenorhabditis. The third branch includes (1) a single yeast gene (YLR419w); (2) six Drosophila genes, including maleless and spindle-E/homeless; (3) four human genes, among them the ortholog of maleless, which encodes RNA helicase A; and (4) three C. elegans genes, including orthologs of maleless and spindle-E. Thus, this branch has largely expanded in metazoans. We also show that, for the whole DEAH family, only MLE and its metazoan orthologs have acquired new protein domains since the fungi/animals split. We found a total of 17 MYST family proteins in the four analyzed species. We determined putative orthologs of mof in both C. elegans and H. sapiens, and we show that the most likely ortholog in yeast is the Sas2 gene. Moreover, a paralog of mof exists in Drosophila. All of these results, together with those found for a third member of the compensasome, msl-3, suggest that this complex emerged after the fungi/animals split and that it may be present in mammalian species. Both gene duplication and the acquisition of new protein modules may have played important roles in the origin of the compensasome.