Phylogenetic Analysisof Trichomonade Xylosyltransferases

Our goal is to search for xylosyltransferase genes from the T vaginalis EST genome database by bioinformatics approaches. First, we have constructed a theoretical model of conserved xylosyltransferase sequences based on a hidden Markov models (HMM) built from known xylosyltransferases sequences. Eight candidate sequences of xylosyltransferase are detected in T vaginalis genome. We have also confirmed the results by blasting through NCBI´s non-redundant protein database. To analyze which family of xylosyltransferase these sequences belongs to, we have constructed an unrooted dendrogram of xylosyltransferease protein family, based on distance- matrix method. The result suggests that the T. vaginalis xylosyltransferase sequences are more closely related to beta-1,2-xylosyltransferases, but not to O-linked xylosyltransferase. All our in silico results are consistent with the structural data of T vaginalis N-linked glycans.