BACKGROUND
proteolysis, the enzyme-mediated hydrolysis of peptide bonds, is a vital process for every organism.
it is associated with many intracellular and extracellular events, e.g.
the removal of damaged proteins, nutrient uptake, processing of protein precursors, and signaling  <cit> .
a huge variety of proteolytic enzymes, utilizing several different catalytic mechanism, mediate these processes.
the family of deg proteases   <cit> , also known as htra proteases   <cit> , are one important group of these proteolytic enzymes.
they are atp-independent serine endopeptidases found in all domains of life, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya.
deg/htra proteases belong to the s1b subfamily of the clan pa according to merops nomenclature  <cit> , which features a catalytic domain of the trypsin type, with his-asp-ser as catalytic triad.
most deg/htra family members contain one to four pdz protein-protein interaction domains  <cit> , but members without pdz domains have been described in plants  <cit> ‐ <cit>  and animals  <cit> .
deg/htra proteases are best studied in escherichia coli and mammals, where three  or five  deg/htra paralogs are present, respectively.
degp from e. coli is a protein quality control enzyme in the periplasm, acting as a protease and degrading irreversibly damaged proteins, or as a chaperone, thereby assisting with refolding of denaturated proteins  <cit> .
a second e. coli protease, degs, acts in a stress signaling cascade sensing misfolded proteins in the periplasm and transducing the signal to the cytoplasm  <cit> .
human deg/htra proteases have been shown to play critical roles in severe diseases, such as alzheimer, age-related macular degeneration and several cancers .
compared to the vast literature on prokaryotic and mammalian deg/htra proteases, relatively little is known about members of this family in plants.
searches in genomic databases revealed  <dig> genes encoding putative deg/htra proteases in arabidopsis thaliana <cit> ,  <dig> in oryza sativa <cit>  and  <dig> in populus trichocarpa <cit> .
however, to date only a few deg/htra proteases from a. thaliana have been studied in detail.
it was experimentally shown that six atdeg proteases are located in chloroplasts  <cit> ‐ <cit> , one in peroxisomes  <cit> , one in mitochondria , and one in the nucleus  <cit> .
two more deg proteases are predicted to reside in chloroplasts, five in mitochondria , and the subcellular location of one protein is uncertain .
the chloroplast-located deg/htra proteases were reported to be involved in the degradation of damaged photosynthetic proteins, especially the photosystem ii  reaction center d <dig> protein under light stress conditions .
additionally, the thylakoid lumen-located atdeg <dig> protease acts as a chaperone, assisting in the assembly of psii dimers and supercomplexes  <cit> .
little is known about deg/htra proteases targeted to compartments other than the chloroplast.
however, it was demonstrated that the peroxisomal atdeg <dig> protease is a processing enzyme, cleaving the n-terminal peroxisomal targeting signal  <dig> that is present in some nuclear-encoded peroxisomal proteins  <cit> .
based on the evolutionary relationship of the conserved trypsin domain, deg/htra proteases from archaea, bacteria and eukarya cluster into four distinct clades, whereby plants are the only organisms containing proteases from all four clades  <cit> .
the relatively high number of deg/htra proteases and their diversity in plants, together with the observation that some of them localize to the same compartment, have a similar domain arrangements, and comparable sizes  <cit> , carries a high risk of confusion.
this is potentiated by the fact that during genome annotation of vascular plants , deg/htra proteases were numbered according to the order of their discovery, thus giving orthologous proteins different numbers and names depending on the organism.
for rice, the situation is even more complex with two independent genome annotation databases for o. sativa ssp.
japonica, i.e.
the rice annotation database  <cit>  and the msu rice genome annotation project database  <cit> .
therefore, one gene might occur in the literature under more than one identifier or name.
in the study presented here, we reassessed the number of deg/htra proteases in several photosynthetic eukaryotic model organisms from the viridiplantae line, such as the dicots a. thaliana and p. trichocarpa, the monocot o. sativa, the moss physcomitrella patens and the unicellular green alga chlamydomonas reinhardtii, whose genomes are completely sequenced.
using phylogenetic comparison and domain structure analysis, we propose a unified nomenclature for deg/htra proteases in green plants  based on the long-established nomenclature reported for a. thaliana <cit> .
furthermore, we were able to identify a “core set” of eight deg/htra proteases shared by all organisms examined here and postulate that the high number of deg/htra proteases in plants is mainly due to gene duplications unique to the respective organism.
RESULTS
an inventory of deg/htra proteases
to establish a standardized nomenclature, we reassessed the number of deg/htra proteases in the vascular plants o. sativa ssp.
japonicaand p. trichocarpa, the moss p. patens and the green alga c. reinhardtii by searching annotated genome databases for the presence of deg/htra sequences .
the secondary structure of these sequences was analyzed using the hhpred platform  <cit>  in order to confirm the presence of a deg/htra protease domain, thereby excluding false positives from the database searches .
additionally, this approach also yielded the domain architecture of con firmed deg/htra proteases, which is included in tables  <dig>
a according to tair database.
b according to  <cit> .
c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform , and the one with intact protease domain and  pdz domain was considered here.
sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material .
d according to the hhpred platform.
abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pdia, inactive protease domain ; pdz, pdz domain.
a first model identifier is from phytozome v <dig>  , the second identifier is the corresponding identifier according to  <cit> .
discrepancies between the suggested gene model and the uniprotkb entry were solved by analyzing the est data  and analysis of the genomic sequence for the presence of orfs yielding aa sequences similar to ortholog or paralog proteins, with respect to potential splicing sites.b according to  <cit> c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform , and the one with intact protease domain and  pdz domain was considered here.
sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material .
d according to the hhpred platform.
abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain ; pdz, pdz domain.
a first model identifier from the rice annotation project , second identifier according to the tigr/msu nomenclature .
b first name according to genbank/unitprotkb, second identifier according to the tigr/msu nomenclature.
c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform , and the one with intact protease domain and  pdz domain was considered here.
sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material .
d according to the hhpred platform.
abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pdia: inactive protease domain ; pdz, pdz domain.
e sequence was modified based on the est data  and comparison with orthologs from other species.
f the hhpred platform detects secondary structures similar to rna polymerase ii large subunit from saccharomyces cerevisiae in the n-terminal part of the protein – this is an indication that the predicted transcription start is incorrectly annotated.
a model identifier according to phytozome v <dig>  .
discrepancies between the suggested gene model and the uniprotkb entry were solved by analyzing est data  and analysis of the genomic sequence for the presence of orfs yielding aa sequences similar to ortholog and paralog proteins, with respect to potential splicing sites.
b if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform , and the one with intact protease domain and  pdz domain was considered here.
sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material .
c according to the hhpred platform.
abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain ; pdz, pdz domain.
d fragment extended based on the est data .
a according to the phytozome v <dig>  database .
b first name according the phytozome v <dig>  database, second name according to uniprotkb .
c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform , and the one with intact protease domain and  pdz domain was considered here.
sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material .
d according to the hhpred platform.
abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potantially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain ; pdz, pdz domain.
e model is probably not correct, not supported by est, repetetive stretches of single amino acids.
for the poplar tree p. trichocarpa, 20 deg/htra genes were identified in an initial survey  <cit> .
however, only  <dig> of those genes could be confirmed by this work .
the discrepancy between the two studies is due to improved gene models provided by the more recent release of the p. trichocarpa phytozome  <dig>  database .
previously described ptdeg <dig> , ptdeg <dig>  and ptdeg <dig>  ,  <cit> ) are obsolete, while ptdeg <dig>  and ptdeg <dig>   are parts of a single open reading frame , designated as poptr_0013s <dig> .
additionally, a new gene model, similar to the former pt <dig> , was identified .
therefore, the genome of p. trichocarpa contains less deg/htra protein genes than described before.
the 15 deg/htra protease genes that were reported earlier for o. sativa <cit>  were confirmed in this study .
however, the protease previously reported as osdegp <dig>  was only found in the msu rice genome annotation project database  <cit> , but not in the rice annotation database  <cit> , and an additional potential osdeg protease was identified  by blast search and homology prediction .
both proteases lack recognizable pdz domains.
the protein os02g <dig> , originally named osdegp <dig>  possesses a similar domain arrangement to atdeg <dig>  since it contains two protease domains  and four pdz domains .
proteins os01g <dig> , os08g <dig> , and os12g <dig>  appear to be proteolytically inactive due to mutated active site residues, with the latter containing two inactive protease domains and lacking a pdz domain .
seventeen genes encoding for deg/htra proteins are present in the genome of the moss p. patens .
two of these proteins, pp1s176_111v <dig> and pp1s67_44v <dig>  have mutated active site residues in their protease domain and are predicted to be proteolytically inactive , while pp1s63_95v <dig> and pp1s196_28v <dig> do not contain any detectable pdz domain.
two other proteins, pp1s237_5v <dig> and pp1s21_327v <dig> have, similarly to atdeg <dig>  a potentially active and an inactive protease domain .
in the genome of c. reinhardtii 15 deg/htra genes were identified .
three of these genes, cre <dig> g <dig>  cre <dig> g <dig>  and cre <dig> g <dig> t <dig>  encode proteolytically inactive enzymes, since at least one residue of the catalytic triad is missing in each of these proteins .
cre <dig> g <dig> contains, in addition to a deg/htra protease domain, a beta-glycanhydrolase domain in the same orf, but at present it is not clear whether this constitutes a new type of domain combination or is the result of an erroneous gene annotation.
during the analysis of the deg/htra sequences from c. reinhardtii, the occurrence of long  single aa repeats reduced the quality of sequence alignments and hints to a general problem with the assembly of the c. reinhardtii genome.
therefore, the number of deg/htra proteases might change with future genome database updates, similar to the situation in p. trichocarpa.
as mentioned earlier, the number of deg/htra proteases present in non-plant organisms is much lower.
a general trend to an increased number of protein family members in plants has also been observed for other serine protease families  <cit> .
however, the reasons for this phenomenon remain elusive.
compared to other organisms, plants have acquired an additional, highly structured and complex compartment, the chloroplast, and perform oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that is connected to the generation of reactive oxygen species.
it is tempting to speculate that this might contribute to an increased need for proteolytic capabilities, and therefore higher protease numbers.
on the other hand, although land plants are sessile and therefore cannot escape from stress conditions, the high number of genes encoding deg/htra proteases is unlikely to reflect an adaptation to this life style, since the motile green algae c. rheinhardtii possesses a comparable number of deg/htra encoding genes.
phylogenetic analysis of “green“deg/htra proteases – proposal of a standardized nomenclature
to establish a nomenclature system based on homologies, we next examined the evolutionary relationship of the deg/htra proteases retrieved from the database searches.
the aa sequences of protease domains containing an intact catalytic triad as identified by the sequence alignment were phylogenetically analyzed using the maximum likelihood  method.
proteases htra , hhoa , and hhob  from the cyanobacterium synechocystis sp.
pcc <dig>  <cit>  were included into the tree for comparision, due to the cyanobacterial origin of chloroplasts  <cit> .
as the focus of this study is on green plants, no sequences from other photosynthetic eukaryotes  were included.
proteins lacking the catalytic triad or with an incomplete protease domain  were not included in this analysis to avoid misleading positions in the resulting phylogenetic tree.
the presence of such inactive protease variants in plant genomes suggests that they might have acquired roles other than proteolysis, resulting in altered evolutionary pressure on the protease domain and the potential for higher mutagenesis rates.
initial phylogentic analysis showed that four proteins, such as os12g <dig> , os12g <dig>  and os03g <dig>  from o. sativa and cre <dig> g <dig> from c. rheinhardtii  did not cluster with any other analyzed deg/htra protease and seemed to be only distant relatives of this protease family .
hence these proteases were excluded in the further analysis for clarity .
the deg/htra proteases investigated here form four distinct clades , similar to an earlier study that included deg/htra proteases from evolutionarily very distant taxa and only a few plant orthologs  <cit> .
clade i is further split into two subgroups, where subgroup ia includes orthologs of deg <dig>  deg <dig> and deg <dig> .
subgroup ib comprises the prokaryotic  deg/htra proteases, and one protease each from the land plants a. thaliana , p. trichocarpa , o. sativa  and p. patens .
notably, the deg <dig> protease is missing in the green alga c. reinhardti .
ppdeg1-group-like , which passed all validation procedures as described above and in the 'methods' section, seems to be more distantly related to deg/htra proteases from groups ia and ib .
based on its position in the tree, and the comparably low bootstrap support, it was not possible to decide whether it can be included in subgroup ia or ib.
alternatively, the gene model and the respective protein sequence might require improvement.
clade ii includes atdeg2-atdeg <dig> and atdeg9-atdeg <dig> and their orthologs .
clades iii and iv gather atdeg <dig> and atdeg <dig> and their orthologs, respectively .
based on the phylogenetic tree, we grouped all orthologous deg/htra proteases from analyzed plant species and propose a common name for enzymes from the same group in order to unify the nomenclature between different plant species .
since the majority of detailed studies on plant deg/htra proteases focused on a. thaliana enzymes, we used their well-established nomenclature  <cit>  as a guideline for renaming deg/htra orthologs in the other organisms analyzed here .
in p. trichocarpa, we renamed ptdeg <dig>   to ptdeg <dig> since only one isoform of this protein is present in this organism and combined ptdeg <dig>   and ptdeg <dig>   encoded by the same orf  under the common name ptdeg <dig> .
a new gene model  similar to atdeg <dig> was named ptdeg <dig>
for deg/htra proteases from o. sativa, we propose to change the existing nomenclature present in the tigr/msu database  <cit> , and we also provide preliminary new names for the more distantly related deg/htra-like proteases or proteins without an intact protease domain .
for these proteins, we suggest to use the names “osdeg-like1-6”, in order to prevent confusion between e.g.
osdeg <dig>  and the more distantly related protein formerly know as „osdegp1“, now osdeg-like <dig>  .
since no names were given for annotated deg/htra proteases in p. patens we propose to name them based on phylogeny as suggested in table  <dig> .
for c. reinhardtii, the proposed nomenclature of deg/htra proteases partially matched those present in the phytozome  <dig>  and uniprot databases .
however, we suggest to change the names of deg <dig> , deg <dig>  and deg <dig>  to crdeg <dig> , crdeg <dig> , and crdeg <dig>   since all three proteases are more closely related to atdeg <dig> than to atdeg <dig> or atdeg <dig> .
for cre <dig> g <dig>  we propose the name crdeg <dig> , since its protease domain seems to be evolutionary related to atdeg <dig>  although the domain arrangement of this protease  is unusual for these enzymes .
the protease domain of cre <dig> g <dig>  described as deg <dig> in both the phytozome  <dig>  and uniprot databases, seems to be more closely related to those of deg <dig> proteases, but the bootstrap support is insufficient to justify its renaming.
for this reason we suggest the name crdeg <dig>  for this protein .
a new gene model cre <dig> g <dig> was named crdeg <dig>  since the protease domain was the closest related to those of atdeg <dig> .
analysis of domain arrangement supports proposed nomenclature
analysis of the protein aa sequences with the hhpred platform yielded predictions for the number and the arrangement of protease and pdz domains in each deg/htra protease .
this data supports the presence of four major deg/htra clades , as reported before  <cit> .
proteases from clade i contain one protease domain and one pdz domain , whereas proteases from clade ii contain one protease domain and two pdz domains .
clades iii and iv contain deg/htra proteases with non-canonical domain arrangements: clade iii consists of very large proteins , which according to prediction contain one active and one inactive protease domain, and  <dig> pdz domains .
recently, it was shown that the inactive protease domain in atdeg <dig> is involved in trimerization of this enzyme  <cit> .
whether this holds true for other deg <dig> orthologs remains to be examined.
proteins from clade iv do not contain any detectable pdz domain, and their protease domain is shifted towards the c-terminus .
since this domain arrangement is unusual for deg/htra proteases  <cit> , proteins from this group are sometimes not classified as members of this family, e.g.
the mammalian ortholog of plant deg <dig>  called tysnd <dig>  <cit> .
however, due to the presence of a deg/htra protease domain we classified deg <dig> orthologs as deg/htra family members .
although the phylogenetic tree and, as a consequence, the standardized protease nomenclature are built on the aa sequences of the protease domains alone, they are supported by the analysis of the domain arrangements, using the aa sequence of the full-length protein.
all proteases share the same domain arrangement with their nearest ortholog, e.g.
all deg <dig> proteins from the five analyzed organisms possess one pdz domain, all deg <dig> proteins contain none and all deg <dig> proteins contain two protease and four pdz domains .
a “core set“of deg/htra proteases in plants
all organisms examined here contain between  <dig> to 17 deg/htra-encoding genes, whereas the number of potentially active enzymes is slightly lower.
although the total number of deg/htra proteases is similar in all plants analyzed in this study, the distribution of the proteases within the phylogenetic tree  differs for each species.
in the genome of p. trichocarpa, several genes for deg/htra protease isoforms exist  and this is probably the result of a whole genome duplication  <cit> .
a similar large-scale duplication event  <cit>  could explain the presence of duplicated deg/htra protease genes in the genome of p. patens .
in contrast, atdeg <dig>  atdeg <dig>  atdeg <dig>  atdeg <dig>  and atdeg <dig> in a. thaliana seem to be duplicated versions of atdeg <dig>  since all of them belong to clade ii and cluster exclusively with deg <dig> proteases from all species investigated here .
atdeg <dig>  and atdeg <dig> , as well as atdeg <dig>  and atdeg <dig> , are encoded by genes arranged in tandem arrays, indicating individual gene duplication events.
from this collection of deg/htra protease encoding genes, we extracted the hypothetical minimum number of deg/htra proteases present in plants.
this “core set” represents conserved deg/htra protease types found in every organism examined here, in the lowest possible copy number – for example, the genome of p. trichocarpa contains three ptdeg <dig> genes, however, a. thaliana and o. sativa contain only one, therefore the “core set” contains one deg <dig> protease.
for plants, this conserved “core set” consists of eight proteases , such as deg <dig>  deg <dig>  and deg <dig> detected in the thylakoid lumen  <cit> ‐ <cit> , deg <dig> and deg <dig> in the chloroplast stroma  <cit> , deg <dig> in the nucleolus  <cit> , deg <dig> in the peroxisome  <cit> , and deg <dig> is predicted to have a mitochondrial localization  <cit> .
c. reinhardtii, for example, possesses only “core set” proteases as deg/htra enzymes, although some are present in duplicates.
this “core set” seems to provide all the proteolytic potential of deg/htra proteases that is necessary for a hypothetical plant cell.
the presence of a protease in a particular organism is indicated by +, its absence by -.
if more than one isoform is present, the names are given.
proteases of the “core set” are depicted in bold.
at, arabidopsis thaliana; cr, chlamydomonas reinhardtii; os, oryza sativa; pp, physcomitrella patens; pt, populus trichocarpa.
CONCLUSIONS
in this study, we present the first detailed analysis of the deg/htra protease family in green plants, including genomes from vascular plants, a moss, and a green alga.
based on phylogenetic analysis of the protease domains and analysis of the domain arrangement in the full-length protease, we propose a standardized nomenclature for deg/htra proteases in plants.
although biochemical data is only available for selected proteases from a. thaliana, our data suggests  that proteases with the same name might indeed execute comparable physiological functions.
compared to animals and prokaryotes, the number of deg/htra proteases encoded in plant genomes is much higher, which is partially due to genome or gene duplications.
however, the exact reasons are probably different for every organism.
a “core set” of eight protease genes was identified for plants, of which at least one copy is present in every genome examined here.
this seems to be the minimum number of deg/htra proteases necessary for plants.
we are confident that the work presented here will be a valuable tool and guide-line for future research on plant deg/htra proteases that will allow easy communication between research groups working with different photosynthetic organisms.

 proteolysis, the enzyme-mediated hydrolysis of peptide bonds, is a vital process for every organism. it is associated with many intracellular and extracellular events, e.g. the removal of damaged proteins, nutrient uptake, processing of protein precursors, and signaling. a huge variety of proteolytic enzymes, utilizing several different catalytic mechanism, mediate these processes. the family of deg proteases, also known as htra proteases, are one important group of these proteolytic enzymes. they are atp-independent serine endopeptidases found in all domains of life, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya. deg/htra proteases belong to the s1b subfamily of the clan pa according to merops nomenclature, which features a catalytic domain of the trypsin type, with his-asp-ser as catalytic triad. most deg/htra family members contain one to four pdz protein-protein interaction domains, but members without pdz domains have been described in plants ‐ and animals. deg/htra proteases are best studied in escherichia coli and mammals, where three or five deg/htra paralogs are present, respectively. degp from e. coli is a protein quality control enzyme in the periplasm, acting as a protease and degrading irreversibly damaged proteins, or as a chaperone, thereby assisting with refolding of denaturated proteins. a second e. coli protease, degs, acts in a stress signaling cascade sensing misfolded proteins in the periplasm and transducing the signal to the cytoplasm. human deg/htra proteases have been shown to play critical roles in severe diseases, such as alzheimer, age-related macular degeneration and several cancers. compared to the vast literature on prokaryotic and mammalian deg/htra proteases, relatively little is known about members of this family in plants. searches in genomic databases revealed genes encoding putative deg/htra proteases in arabidopsis thaliana, in oryza sativa and in populus trichocarpa. however, to date only a few deg/htra proteases from a. thaliana have been studied in detail. it was experimentally shown that six atdeg proteases are located in chloroplasts ‐, one in peroxisomes, one in mitochondria, and one in the nucleus. two more deg proteases are predicted to reside in chloroplasts, five in mitochondria, and the subcellular location of one protein is uncertain. the chloroplast-located deg/htra proteases were reported to be involved in the degradation of damaged photosynthetic proteins, especially the photosystem ii reaction center d protein under light stress conditions. additionally, the thylakoid lumen-located atdeg protease acts as a chaperone, assisting in the assembly of psii dimers and supercomplexes. little is known about deg/htra proteases targeted to compartments other than the chloroplast. however, it was demonstrated that the peroxisomal atdeg protease is a processing enzyme, cleaving the n-terminal peroxisomal targeting signal that is present in some nuclear-encoded peroxisomal proteins. based on the evolutionary relationship of the conserved trypsin domain, deg/htra proteases from archaea, bacteria and eukarya cluster into four distinct clades, whereby plants are the only organisms containing proteases from all four clades. the relatively high number of deg/htra proteases and their diversity in plants, together with the observation that some of them localize to the same compartment, have a similar domain arrangements, and comparable sizes, carries a high risk of confusion. this is potentiated by the fact that during genome annotation of vascular plants, deg/htra proteases were numbered according to the order of their discovery, thus giving orthologous proteins different numbers and names depending on the organism. for rice, the situation is even more complex with two independent genome annotation databases for o. sativa ssp. japonica, i.e. the rice annotation database and the msu rice genome annotation project database. therefore, one gene might occur in the literature under more than one identifier or name. in the study presented here, we reassessed the number of deg/htra proteases in several photosynthetic eukaryotic model organisms from the viridiplantae line, such as the dicots a. thaliana and p. trichocarpa, the monocot o. sativa, the moss physcomitrella patens and the unicellular green alga chlamydomonas reinhardtii, whose genomes are completely sequenced. using phylogenetic comparison and domain structure analysis, we propose a unified nomenclature for deg/htra proteases in green plants based on the long-established nomenclature reported for a. thaliana. furthermore, we were able to identify a “core set” of eight deg/htra proteases shared by all organisms examined here and postulate that the high number of deg/htra proteases in plants is mainly due to gene duplications unique to the respective organism.  an inventory of deg/htra proteases to establish a standardized nomenclature, we reassessed the number of deg/htra proteases in the vascular plants o. sativa ssp. japonicaand p. trichocarpa, the moss p. patens and the green alga c. reinhardtii by searching annotated genome databases for the presence of deg/htra sequences. the secondary structure of these sequences was analyzed using the hhpred platform in order to confirm the presence of a deg/htra protease domain, thereby excluding false positives from the database searches. additionally, this approach also yielded the domain architecture of con firmed deg/htra proteases, which is included in tables a according to tair database. b according to. c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform, and the one with intact protease domain and pdz domain was considered here. sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material. d according to the hhpred platform. abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pdia, inactive protease domain; pdz, pdz domain. a first model identifier is from phytozome v, the second identifier is the corresponding identifier according to. discrepancies between the suggested gene model and the uniprotkb entry were solved by analyzing the est data and analysis of the genomic sequence for the presence of orfs yielding aa sequences similar to ortholog or paralog proteins, with respect to potential splicing sites.b according to c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform, and the one with intact protease domain and pdz domain was considered here. sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material. d according to the hhpred platform. abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain; pdz, pdz domain. a first model identifier from the rice annotation project, second identifier according to the tigr/msu nomenclature. b first name according to genbank/unitprotkb, second identifier according to the tigr/msu nomenclature. c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform, and the one with intact protease domain and pdz domain was considered here. sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material. d according to the hhpred platform. abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pdia: inactive protease domain; pdz, pdz domain. e sequence was modified based on the est data and comparison with orthologs from other species. f the hhpred platform detects secondary structures similar to rna polymerase ii large subunit from saccharomyces cerevisiae in the n-terminal part of the protein – this is an indication that the predicted transcription start is incorrectly annotated. a model identifier according to phytozome v. discrepancies between the suggested gene model and the uniprotkb entry were solved by analyzing est data and analysis of the genomic sequence for the presence of orfs yielding aa sequences similar to ortholog and paralog proteins, with respect to potential splicing sites. b if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform, and the one with intact protease domain and pdz domain was considered here. sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material. c according to the hhpred platform. abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potentially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain; pdz, pdz domain. d fragment extended based on the est data. a according to the phytozome v database. b first name according the phytozome v database, second name according to uniprotkb. c if more than one protein entry was present, the different versions were analyzed by the hhpred platform, and the one with intact protease domain and pdz domain was considered here. sequences used in this study are supplied as supplementary material. d according to the hhpred platform. abbreviations: aa, amino acids; n.a., not available; nt, elongated n-terminus; pd, potantially active protease domain; pd, truncated protease domain, probably proteolytically inactive; pdia, inactive protease domain; pdz, pdz domain. e model is probably not correct, not supported by est, repetetive stretches of single amino acids. for the poplar tree p. trichocarpa, 20 deg/htra genes were identified in an initial survey. however, only of those genes could be confirmed by this work. the discrepancy between the two studies is due to improved gene models provided by the more recent release of the p. trichocarpa phytozome database. previously described ptdeg, ptdeg and ptdeg, ) are obsolete, while ptdeg and ptdeg are parts of a single open reading frame, designated as poptr_0013s. additionally, a new gene model, similar to the former pt, was identified. therefore, the genome of p. trichocarpa contains less deg/htra protein genes than described before. the 15 deg/htra protease genes that were reported earlier for o. sativa were confirmed in this study. however, the protease previously reported as osdegp was only found in the msu rice genome annotation project database, but not in the rice annotation database, and an additional potential osdeg protease was identified by blast search and homology prediction. both proteases lack recognizable pdz domains. the protein os02g, originally named osdegp possesses a similar domain arrangement to atdeg since it contains two protease domains and four pdz domains. proteins os01g, os08g, and os12g appear to be proteolytically inactive due to mutated active site residues, with the latter containing two inactive protease domains and lacking a pdz domain. seventeen genes encoding for deg/htra proteins are present in the genome of the moss p. patens. two of these proteins, pp1s176_111v and pp1s67_44v have mutated active site residues in their protease domain and are predicted to be proteolytically inactive, while pp1s63_95v and pp1s196_28v do not contain any detectable pdz domain. two other proteins, pp1s237_5v and pp1s21_327v have, similarly to atdeg a potentially active and an inactive protease domain. in the genome of c. reinhardtii 15 deg/htra genes were identified. three of these genes, cre g cre g and cre g t encode proteolytically inactive enzymes, since at least one residue of the catalytic triad is missing in each of these proteins. cre g contains, in addition to a deg/htra protease domain, a beta-glycanhydrolase domain in the same orf, but at present it is not clear whether this constitutes a new type of domain combination or is the result of an erroneous gene annotation. during the analysis of the deg/htra sequences from c. reinhardtii, the occurrence of long single aa repeats reduced the quality of sequence alignments and hints to a general problem with the assembly of the c. reinhardtii genome. therefore, the number of deg/htra proteases might change with future genome database updates, similar to the situation in p. trichocarpa. as mentioned earlier, the number of deg/htra proteases present in non-plant organisms is much lower. a general trend to an increased number of protein family members in plants has also been observed for other serine protease families. however, the reasons for this phenomenon remain elusive. compared to other organisms, plants have acquired an additional, highly structured and complex compartment, the chloroplast, and perform oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that is connected to the generation of reactive oxygen species. it is tempting to speculate that this might contribute to an increased need for proteolytic capabilities, and therefore higher protease numbers. on the other hand, although land plants are sessile and therefore cannot escape from stress conditions, the high number of genes encoding deg/htra proteases is unlikely to reflect an adaptation to this life style, since the motile green algae c. rheinhardtii possesses a comparable number of deg/htra encoding genes. phylogenetic analysis of “green“deg/htra proteases – proposal of a standardized nomenclature to establish a nomenclature system based on homologies, we next examined the evolutionary relationship of the deg/htra proteases retrieved from the database searches. the aa sequences of protease domains containing an intact catalytic triad as identified by the sequence alignment were phylogenetically analyzed using the maximum likelihood method. proteases htra, hhoa, and hhob from the cyanobacterium synechocystis sp. pcc were included into the tree for comparision, due to the cyanobacterial origin of chloroplasts. as the focus of this study is on green plants, no sequences from other photosynthetic eukaryotes were included. proteins lacking the catalytic triad or with an incomplete protease domain were not included in this analysis to avoid misleading positions in the resulting phylogenetic tree. the presence of such inactive protease variants in plant genomes suggests that they might have acquired roles other than proteolysis, resulting in altered evolutionary pressure on the protease domain and the potential for higher mutagenesis rates. initial phylogentic analysis showed that four proteins, such as os12g, os12g and os03g from o. sativa and cre g from c. rheinhardtii did not cluster with any other analyzed deg/htra protease and seemed to be only distant relatives of this protease family. hence these proteases were excluded in the further analysis for clarity. the deg/htra proteases investigated here form four distinct clades, similar to an earlier study that included deg/htra proteases from evolutionarily very distant taxa and only a few plant orthologs. clade i is further split into two subgroups, where subgroup ia includes orthologs of deg deg and deg. subgroup ib comprises the prokaryotic deg/htra proteases, and one protease each from the land plants a. thaliana, p. trichocarpa, o. sativa and p. patens. notably, the deg protease is missing in the green alga c. reinhardti. ppdeg1-group-like, which passed all validation procedures as described above and in the'methods' section, seems to be more distantly related to deg/htra proteases from groups ia and ib. based on its position in the tree, and the comparably low bootstrap support, it was not possible to decide whether it can be included in subgroup ia or ib. alternatively, the gene model and the respective protein sequence might require improvement. clade ii includes atdeg2-atdeg and atdeg9-atdeg and their orthologs. clades iii and iv gather atdeg and atdeg and their orthologs, respectively. based on the phylogenetic tree, we grouped all orthologous deg/htra proteases from analyzed plant species and propose a common name for enzymes from the same group in order to unify the nomenclature between different plant species. since the majority of detailed studies on plant deg/htra proteases focused on a. thaliana enzymes, we used their well-established nomenclature as a guideline for renaming deg/htra orthologs in the other organisms analyzed here. in p. trichocarpa, we renamed ptdeg to ptdeg since only one isoform of this protein is present in this organism and combined ptdeg and ptdeg encoded by the same orf under the common name ptdeg. a new gene model similar to atdeg was named ptdeg for deg/htra proteases from o. sativa, we propose to change the existing nomenclature present in the tigr/msu database, and we also provide preliminary new names for the more distantly related deg/htra-like proteases or proteins without an intact protease domain. for these proteins, we suggest to use the names “osdeg-like1-6”, in order to prevent confusion between e.g. osdeg and the more distantly related protein formerly know as „osdegp1“, now osdeg-like. since no names were given for annotated deg/htra proteases in p. patens we propose to name them based on phylogeny as suggested in table. for c. reinhardtii, the proposed nomenclature of deg/htra proteases partially matched those present in the phytozome and uniprot databases. however, we suggest to change the names of deg, deg and deg to crdeg, crdeg, and crdeg since all three proteases are more closely related to atdeg than to atdeg or atdeg. for cre g we propose the name crdeg, since its protease domain seems to be evolutionary related to atdeg although the domain arrangement of this protease is unusual for these enzymes. the protease domain of cre g described as deg in both the phytozome and uniprot databases, seems to be more closely related to those of deg proteases, but the bootstrap support is insufficient to justify its renaming. for this reason we suggest the name crdeg for this protein. a new gene model cre g was named crdeg since the protease domain was the closest related to those of atdeg. analysis of domain arrangement supports proposed nomenclature analysis of the protein aa sequences with the hhpred platform yielded predictions for the number and the arrangement of protease and pdz domains in each deg/htra protease. this data supports the presence of four major deg/htra clades, as reported before. proteases from clade i contain one protease domain and one pdz domain, whereas proteases from clade ii contain one protease domain and two pdz domains. clades iii and iv contain deg/htra proteases with non-canonical domain arrangements: clade iii consists of very large proteins, which according to prediction contain one active and one inactive protease domain, and pdz domains. recently, it was shown that the inactive protease domain in atdeg is involved in trimerization of this enzyme. whether this holds true for other deg orthologs remains to be examined. proteins from clade iv do not contain any detectable pdz domain, and their protease domain is shifted towards the c-terminus. since this domain arrangement is unusual for deg/htra proteases, proteins from this group are sometimes not classified as members of this family, e.g. the mammalian ortholog of plant deg called tysnd. however, due to the presence of a deg/htra protease domain we classified deg orthologs as deg/htra family members. although the phylogenetic tree and, as a consequence, the standardized protease nomenclature are built on the aa sequences of the protease domains alone, they are supported by the analysis of the domain arrangements, using the aa sequence of the full-length protein. all proteases share the same domain arrangement with their nearest ortholog, e.g. all deg proteins from the five analyzed organisms possess one pdz domain, all deg proteins contain none and all deg proteins contain two protease and four pdz domains. a “core set“of deg/htra proteases in plants all organisms examined here contain between to 17 deg/htra-encoding genes, whereas the number of potentially active enzymes is slightly lower. although the total number of deg/htra proteases is similar in all plants analyzed in this study, the distribution of the proteases within the phylogenetic tree differs for each species. in the genome of p. trichocarpa, several genes for deg/htra protease isoforms exist and this is probably the result of a whole genome duplication. a similar large-scale duplication event could explain the presence of duplicated deg/htra protease genes in the genome of p. patens. in contrast, atdeg atdeg atdeg atdeg and atdeg in a. thaliana seem to be duplicated versions of atdeg since all of them belong to clade ii and cluster exclusively with deg proteases from all species investigated here. atdeg and atdeg, as well as atdeg and atdeg, are encoded by genes arranged in tandem arrays, indicating individual gene duplication events. from this collection of deg/htra protease encoding genes, we extracted the hypothetical minimum number of deg/htra proteases present in plants. this “core set” represents conserved deg/htra protease types found in every organism examined here, in the lowest possible copy number – for example, the genome of p. trichocarpa contains three ptdeg genes, however, a. thaliana and o. sativa contain only one, therefore the “core set” contains one deg protease. for plants, this conserved “core set” consists of eight proteases, such as deg deg and deg detected in the thylakoid lumen ‐, deg and deg in the chloroplast stroma, deg in the nucleolus, deg in the peroxisome, and deg is predicted to have a mitochondrial localization. c. reinhardtii, for example, possesses only “core set” proteases as deg/htra enzymes, although some are present in duplicates. this “core set” seems to provide all the proteolytic potential of deg/htra proteases that is necessary for a hypothetical plant cell. the presence of a protease in a particular organism is indicated by +, its absence by -. if more than one isoform is present, the names are given. proteases of the “core set” are depicted in bold. at, arabidopsis thaliana; cr, chlamydomonas reinhardtii; os, oryza sativa; pp, physcomitrella patens; pt, populus trichocarpa.  in this study, we present the first detailed analysis of the deg/htra protease family in green plants, including genomes from vascular plants, a moss, and a green alga. based on phylogenetic analysis of the protease domains and analysis of the domain arrangement in the full-length protease, we propose a standardized nomenclature for deg/htra proteases in plants. although biochemical data is only available for selected proteases from a. thaliana, our data suggests that proteases with the same name might indeed execute comparable physiological functions. compared to animals and prokaryotes, the number of deg/htra proteases encoded in plant genomes is much higher, which is partially due to genome or gene duplications. however, the exact reasons are probably different for every organism. a “core set” of eight protease genes was identified for plants, of which at least one copy is present in every genome examined here. this seems to be the minimum number of deg/htra proteases necessary for plants. we are confident that the work presented here will be a valuable tool and guide-line for future research on plant deg/htra proteases that will allow easy communication between research groups working with different photosynthetic organisms. 
during genome annotations most proteases were named according to the order of discovery, hence the same names were sometimes given to different types of deg/htra enzymes in different plant species. in our proposed nomenclature, the evolutionarily closest orthologs have the same protease name, simplifying scientific communication when comparing different plant species and allowing for more reliable inference of protease functions. using phylogenetic and domain arrangement analysis, we improved the nomenclature of the deg/htra protease family, standardized protease names based on their well-established nomenclature in arabidopsis thaliana, and clarified the evolutionary relationship between orthologous enzymes from various photosynthetic organisms across several divergent systematic groups, including dicots, a monocot, a moss and a green alga. therefore, the existing names and classification of these proteolytic enzymes does not meet our current needs and a phylogeny-based standardized nomenclature is required. further, we proposed that the high number of deg/htra proteases in plants is mainly due to gene duplications unique to the respective organism. furthermore, we identified a “core set” of eight proteases shared by all organisms examined here that might provide all the proteolytic potential of deg/htra proteases necessary for a hypothetical plant cell. the deg/htra family of atp-independent serine endopeptidases is present in nearly all organisms from bacteria to human and vascular plants.
 the deg/htra family of atp-independent serine endopeptidases is present in nearly all organisms from bacteria to human and vascular plants. in recent years, multiple deg/htra protease genes were identified in various plant genomes. during genome annotations most proteases were named according to the order of discovery, hence the same names were sometimes given to different types of deg/htra enzymes in different plant species. this can easily lead to false inference of individual protease functions based solely on a shared name. therefore, the existing names and classification of these proteolytic enzymes does not meet our current needs and a phylogeny-based standardized nomenclature is required.  using phylogenetic and domain arrangement analysis, we improved the nomenclature of the deg/htra protease family, standardized protease names based on their well-established nomenclature in arabidopsis thaliana, and clarified the evolutionary relationship between orthologous enzymes from various photosynthetic organisms across several divergent systematic groups, including dicots, a monocot, a moss and a green alga. furthermore, we identified a “core set” of eight proteases shared by all organisms examined here that might provide all the proteolytic potential of deg/htra proteases necessary for a hypothetical plant cell.  in our proposed nomenclature, the evolutionarily closest orthologs have the same protease name, simplifying scientific communication when comparing different plant species and allowing for more reliable inference of protease functions. further, we proposed that the high number of deg/htra proteases in plants is mainly due to gene duplications unique to the respective organism. 