Evolution of phenylalanyl-tRNA synthetase by domain losing.

The gene duplication, fusion and horizontal transfer are the frequent events during evolution of many proteins, including the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (AARSs). However, in this work, it was shown that the main event during evolution of phenylalanyl-tRNA synthetase (PheRS) is a domain loss, and the function/activity of PheRS is not affected by domain losing. Generally, the size of genome and number of genes are increased during evolution from bacteria to eukaryote, but the interesting thing is that the type and number of PheRS domains in eukaryote are obviously less than those in bacteria. The evolution of PheRS by domain losing seems to be related to the functional evolution of some AARSs from the multiple specificities to the single specificity.