Evolutionary Conservation of Ubiquitin C in Mammals Evaluatedby Phylogenetic and Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

Ubiquitin C (UbC) plays a key role in providing ubiquitin required for maintaining protein
homeostasis and responding to stress. Nevertheless, its evolutionary conservation across different
species is important for its application in comparative and computational studies. UbC messenger
RNA (mRNA) sequences from representative eukaryotic taxa were downloaded from publicly
available repository, curated and subsequent alignment was conducted. Phylogenetic relationships
were subsequently inferred using MEGA. Furthermore, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was
executed using a custom-built Python tool based on an identity-derived genetic distance matrix
computed from pairwise sequence identities. Phylogenetic and PCA analyses showed a strong
conservation of UbC sequences across mammals, highlighting distinct clusters of mammalian
groups and a gradual divergence when looking at non-mammalian vertebrates, invertebrates, and
plants. The PCA results backed up the phylogenetic structure, effectively capturing the main axes
of sequence variation that align with evolutionary distances. These findings highlight that UbC is
quite stable among mammals, yet shows more variation when consider at a wider range of
eukaryotic lineages. This supports its role as a reliable reference gene in mammalian studies, while
also emphasizing the importance for lineage specific interpretive considerations in cross-species
comparative analyses