Abstract
BACKGROUND: The superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is one of the largest within most mammals. GPCRs are important targets for pharmaceuticals and the rat is one of the most widely used model organisms in biological research. Accurate comparisons of protein families in rat, mice and human are thus important for interpretation of many physiological and pharmacological studies. However, current automated protein predictions and annotations are limited and error prone. RESULTS: We searched the rat genome for GPCRs and obtained 1867 full-length genes and 739 pseudogenes. We identified 1277 new full-length rat GPCRs, whereof 1235 belong to the large group of olfactory receptors. Moreover, we updated the datasets of GPCRs from the human and mouse genomes with 1 and 43 new genes, respectively. The total numbers of full-length genes (and pseudogenes) identified were 799 (583) for human and 1783 (702) for mouse. The rat, human and mouse GPCRs were classified into 7 families named the Glutamate, Rhodopsin, Adhesion, Frizzled, Secretin, Taste2 and Vomeronasal1 families. We performed comprehensive phylogenetic analyses of these families and provide detailed information about orthologues and species-specific receptors. We found that 65 human Rhodopsin family GPCRs are orphans and 56 of these have an orthologue in rat. CONCLUSION: Interestingly, we found that the proportion of one-to-one GPCR orthologues was only 58% between rats and humans and only 70% between the rat and mouse, which is much lower than stated for the entire set of all genes. This is in mainly related to the sensory GPCRs. The average protein sequence identities of the GPCR orthologue pairs is also lower than for the whole genomes. We found these to be 80% for the rat and human pairs and 90% for the rat and mouse pairs. However, the proportions of orthologous and species-specific genes vary significantly between the different GPCR families. The largest diversification is seen for GPCRs that respond to exogenous stimuli indicating that the variation in their repertoires reflects to a large extent the adaptation of the species to their environment. This report provides the first overall roadmap of the GPCR repertoire in rat and detailed comparisons with the mouse and human repertoires.