They include type II PKS classes such as keto synthase (KS), chain length factor (CLF), acyl carrier protein (ACP), keto reductase (KR), aromatase (ARO), cyclase (CYC), keto synthase III (KSIII), acyl CoA ligase (AL), acyl transferase (AT), malonyl-CoA: ACP transacylase (MCAT), and thioesterase (TE). We performed homology based clustering analysis for the sequences of each type II PKS class based on I-BET151 cost sequence similarity and biosynthetic function because several classes of type II PKSs such as KR, ARO and CYC have various

different types of subclasses [4, 14] and the Pfam search tool [15] and the Conserved Domain VX-680 clinical trial Database (CDD) server of NCBI [16] often failed to identify domains in type II PKS protein sequences (see Additional file 1: Table S3). The sequences of each type II PKS class were grouped into clusters using the BLASTCLUST from the BLAST software package [17]. The number of cluster is determined when type

II PKSs with different biosynthetic function were accurately separated. The subclasses determined by the sequence clustering analysis matched well with the known functional subclasses reported in literature for KR, ARO, and CYC. There was no evidence showing separate DCLK1 functional groups in KS III class yet but our analysis showed selleck that the sequence-based subclasses of KS III have discriminating patterns

as significant as the subclasses of other PKS domains. We maintain these subclasses of KS III as the potential subgroups of KS III in our study. We could confirm that the pattern of sequence conservation in C7 KR cluster is different from that of C9 KR cluster. We also could confirm that ARO clusters agreed well with previously known subgroups such as a monodomain and two didomain types. The N-terminal and C-terminal domain types of didomain aromatase and monodomain types of aromatases from literature are mapped to ARO subclasses a, b, and c, respectively [18]. In addition, CYC clusters well correspond to previously reported phylogenetic analysis result of type II PKS tailoring enzymes, which shows that the ring topology of aromatic polyketide correlates well with the types of cyclases [4]. As a result, we identified that 11 type II PKS classes were clustered into a total of 20 types of subclasses with distinct biosynthetic function and different average length of domain sequences as shown in Table 1 (see Additional file 1: Table S4).