Sequence search and comparative genomic analysis of SUMO-activating enzymes using CoGe

The growing number of genome sequences completed during the last few years has made necessary the development of bioinformatics tools for the easy access and retrieval of sequence data, as well as for downstream comparative genomic analyses. Some of these are implemented as online platforms that integrate genomic data produced by different genome sequencing initiatives with data mining tools as well as various comparative genomic and evolutionary analysis possibilities. Here, we use the online comparative genomics platform CoGe (http://www.genomevolution.org/coge/) (Lyons and Freeling. Plant J 53:661–673, 2008; Tang and Lyons. Front Plant Sci 3:172, 2012) (1) to retrieve the entire complement of orthologous and paralogous genes belonging to the SUMOActivating Enzymes 1 (SAE1) gene family from a set of species representative of the Brassicaceae plant eudicot family with genomes fully sequenced, and (2) to investigate the history, timing, and molecular mechanisms of the gene duplications driving the evolutionary expansion and functional diversification of the SAE1 family in Brassicaceae.