C. elegans Protein Kinases

The nematode C. elegans provides a powerful system for the study of protein kinases, as the first sequenced multicellular genome, with a wealth of genetics and genomics tools and data. Its evolutionary position provides important information on the evolution of kinases in multicellular animals, and the sequencing of additional nematode genomes promises additional sequence-function discoveries.

New:: Our latest revision and analysis of the kinases of C. elegans, and a preliminary analysis of the C. briggsae kinome has been published in Wormbook:

Genomic Overview of Protein Kinases.
G. Manning (2005)
Wormbook, ed. The C. elegans Research Community, Wormbook, doi/10.1895/wormbook.1.60.1, http://www.wormbook.org
(HTML, PDF)
The Kinbase database will be updated to reflect changes in sequences and classification early in 2006.

Our analysis of the C. elegans kinome was first published in PNAS:

The protein kinases of Caenorhabditis elegans: a model for signal transduction in multicellular organisms.
GD Plowman, S Sudarsanam, J Bingham, D Whyte, T Hunter (1999).
PNAS 96 (24) 13603-10. (Medline Abstract, PDF full text)
Improvements in gene prediction, classification and biological understanding have lead to re-analyses, including the TiBS Kinase Evolution paper, and the WormBook paper cited above. A paper on the informatics behind the C. elegans kinome discovery has also been published:
Informatics issues in large-scale sequence analysis: elucidating the protein kinases of C. elegans.
J Bingham, GD Plowman, S. Sudarsanam (2000).
J. Cell Biochem 80 (2) 181-6. (Medline Abstract, PDF full text)

The tables and figures below provide tabular and graphical summaries of the results from the original PNAS paper.

Tables

Figures