Kinome

In molecular biology, the kinome of an organism is the set of protein kinases in its genome. Kinases are enzymes that catalyze phosphorylation reactions (of amino acids) and fall into several groups and families, e.g., those that phosphorylate the amino acids serine and threonine, those that phosphorylate tyrosine and some that can phosphorylate both, such as the MAP2K and GSK families. The term was first used in 2002 by Gerard Manning and colleagues in twin papers analyzing the 518 human protein kinases and the evolution of protein kinases throughout eukaryotes. Other kinomes have been determined for rice, several fungi, nematodes, and insects, sea urchins, Dictyostelium discoideum, and the process of infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Although the primary sequence of kinases shows substantial divergence between unrelated eukaryotes, variation in the motifs that are actually phosphorylated by eukaryotic kinases is much smaller.