Notice of RetractionMolecular Cloning of Two IAP Genes in Tribolium Castaneum and Their Evolution in Animal Genomes

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAPs) constitute a family of proteins that contain one to three baculovirus IAP repeats(BIR). This IAP protein family ensure cell viability directly binding to caspases through the BIR domain and regulating their activities in an ubiquitin-dependent manner. But they are also regulated by IAP antagonists. This is the first time that the iap genes are cloned in the coleoptera insects. In this research ,to investigate the IAP regulation pathway in coleoptera , two iap gene called Tiap1 and Tiap2 were cloned from Tribolium castaneum by RT PCR and sequenced. They are 1017bp, 1045bp in length, respectively. The putative protein of Tiap1 contains two BIR domains and one RING finger domain, while the other putative Tiap2 has three BIR domains and one RING finger domain. By comparison with the known proteins in the NCBI, Tiap1 shared moderate identity with Bombyx mori IAP (GENE ID: 692576, 55.95%) and Tiap2 shared moderate identity with Drosophila IAP (GENE ID: 36748, 53.37%). Multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree analysis shows that Tribolium castaneum Tiap1 and Tiap2 are grouped into two clades because of the different amount of the BIR domain they contain. Phylogenetic analysis suggests a unique loss event for the iap gene happened before insect speciation.