The discovery of enzymes with lipolytic activities in all kingdoms of life from prokaryote to eukaryote species raises the possibility of the presence of an evolutionary relationship history of these proteins among many species of various living organisms. The chapter suggests a strategy based on the phylogenetic distribution and homology conservation in plant lipolytic enzymes for possible depiction of their biological evolution. Extensive databases and online resources for lipidomics and related areas are useful tools to analyze the different lipolytic enzymes in the three major super kingdoms of life, including higher plants kingdom and confined organisms such as algae that have recently gained much interest due to their promising potential applications in lipids hydrolysis and biosynthesis. Multiple sequence alignments of the identified lipolytic enzymes from databases could serve to the identification of globally conserved residues as well as conserved sequence motifs. Estimation of evolutionary distance between the various identified lipolytic enzymes could also be carried out to better understand the pattern of evolution.
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Lipids, lipid-based derivatives and relevant enzymes are a wide range of organic molecules, which fulfil various vital roles in biological systems. Many reports have highlighted the important contributions of these molecules in many key functions such as in lipid metabolism, energy and growth and development (Baez, 2013; Freysz, Dreyfus, Massarelli, & Gatt, 1986; Gatt, Freysz, & Mandel, 1978; Schettler, 1967).
Bioinformatics for lipidomics is an emerging research and opportunity to unravel some pertinent information about lipids as well as the enzymes with lipolytic activities. There are many online resources for lipids and lipolytic enzymes. Table 1 lists few online resources for the lipids and relevant enzymes, and their databases. Three important lipid databases are reported, namely, LIPIDAT (Caffrey & Hogan, 1992), LIPIDBANK (Yasugi & Watanabe, 2002) and LMSD (Sud, Fahy, Cotter, Brown, Dennis, Glass… Subramaniam, 2007). As well, LED is a major database for lipase engineering (Fischer & Pleiss, 2003); and ESTHER is a well-recognized database for α/β-hydrolase fold superfamily of proteins (Hotelier, Renault, Cousin, Negre, Marchot, & Chatonnet, 2004; Lenfant, Hotelier, Velluet, Bourne, Marchot, & Chatonnet, 2013). Noting that, generally, lipid databases are created on the basis of their different scope and organization, unlike genes and proteins databanks, because of the lack of universal lipid classification scheme (Namasivayam, Kowsalya, Padarthi, Manigandan, Jayaraj, Johnravindar, & Jagatheesh, 2015).