Summary

RhoGEF domain

Guanine nucleotide exchange factor for Rho/Rac/Cdc42-like GTPases Also called Dbl-homologous (DH) domain. It appears that PF00169 domains invariably occur C-terminal to RhoGEF/DH domains.

Literature references

Cerione RA, Zheng Y; , Curr Opin Cell Biol 1996;8:216-222.: The Dbl family of oncogenes. PUBMED:8791419
Hart MJ, Eva A, Evans T, Aaronson SA, Cerione RA; , Nature 1991;354:311-314.: Catalysis of guanine nucleotide exchange on the CDC42Hs protein by the dbl oncogene product. PUBMED:1956381
Tan EC, Leung T, Manser E, Lim L; , J Biol Chem 1993;268:27291-27298.: The human active breakpoint cluster region-related gene encodes a brain protein with homology to guanine nucleotide exchange proteins and GTPase-activating proteins. PUBMED:8262969
Soisson SM, Nimnual AS, Uy M, Bar-Sagi D, Kuriyan J; , Cell 1998;95:259-268.: Crystal structure of the Dbl and pleckstrin homology domains from the human Son of sevenless protein. PUBMED:9790532

InterPro entry IPR000219

The Rho family GTPases Rho, Rac and CDC42 regulate a diverse array of cellular processes. Like all members of the Ras superfamily, the Rho proteins cycle between active GTP-bound and inactive GDP-bound conformational states. Activation of Rho proteins through release of bound GDP and subsequent binding of GTP, is catalysed by guanine nucleotide exchange factors (GEFs) in the Dbl family. The proteins encoded by members of the Dbl family share a common domain, presented in this entry, of about 200 residues (designated the Dbl homology or DH domain) that has been shown to encode a GEF activity specific for a number of Rho family members. In addition, all family members possess a second, shared domain designated the pleckstrin homology (PH) domain (). Trio and its homologue UNC-73 are unique within the Dbl family insomuch as they encode two distinct DH/PH domain modules. The PH domain is invariably located immediately C-terminal to the DH domain and this invariant topography suggests a functional interdependence between these two structural modules. Biochemical data have established the role of the conserved DH domain in Rho GTPase interaction and activation, and the role of the tandem PH domain in intracellular targeting and/or regulation of DH domain function. The DH domain of Dbl has been shown to mediate oligomerisation that is mostly homophilic in nature. In addition to the tandem DH/PH domains Dbl family GEFs contain diverse structural motifs like serine/threonine kinase, RBD, PDZ, RGS, IQ, REM, Cdc25, RasGEF, CH, SH2, SH3, EF, spectrin or Ig.

The DH domain is composed of three structurally conserved regions separated by more variable regions. It does not share significant sequence homology with other subtypes of small G-protein GEF motifs such as the Cdc25 domain and the Sec7 domain, which specifically interact with Ras and ARF family small GTPases, respectively, nor with other Rho protein interactive motifs, indicating that the Dbl family proteins are evolutionarily unique. The DH domain is composed of 11 alpha helices that are folded into a flattened, elongated alpha-helix bundle in which two of the three conserved regions, conserved region 1 (CR1) and conserved region 3 (CR3), are exposed near the centre of one surface. CR1 and CR3, together with a part of alpha-6 and the DH/PH junction site, constitute the Rho GTPase interacting pocket.

Gene Ontology

Cellular component	intracellular (GO:0005622)
Molecular function	Rho guanyl-nucleotide exchange factor activity (GO:0005089)
Biological process	regulation of Rho protein signal transduction (GO:0035023)

External database links

HOMSTRAD:	RhoGEF
PANDIT:	PF00621
SCOP:	1dbh
SMART:	RhoGEF
SYSTERS:	RhoGEF

Domain organisation

Below is a listing of the unique domain organisations or architectures in which this domain is found. More...

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Alignments

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. You can use a sequence viewer to look at either the seed or full alignment for the family, or you can look at a plain text version of the sequence in a variety of different formats. More...

View options

Alignment:	Seed (195) Full (2104) NCBI (3196) Metagenomics (28)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (195) Full (2104)
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

Very large alignments can often cause problems for the formatting tool above. If you find that downloading or viewing a large alignment is problematic, you can also download a gzip-compressed, Stockholm-format file containing the seed or full alignment for this family.

You can also download a FASTA format file containing the full-length sequences for all sequences in the full alignment.

The main seed and full alignments are generated using sequences from the UniProt sequence database. However, we also generate alignments using sequences from the NCBI sequence database and the "metaseq" metagenomics dataset.

You can view alignments from these two additional datasets using the form above, or you can download alignments of NCBI or metagenomics sequences, as gzip-compressed files.

Pfam alignments:	Seed (195) Full (2104) NCBI (3196) Metagenomics (28)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (2104)

External links

MyHits provides a collection of tools to handle multiple sequence alignments. For example, one can refine a seed alignment (sequence addition or removal, re-alignment or manual edition) and then search databases for remote homologs using HMMER2.

HMM logo

HMM logos is one way of visualising profile HMMs. Logos provide a quick overview of the properties of an HMM in a graphical form. You can see a more detailed description of HMM logos and find out how you can interpret them here. More...

Trees

This page displays the phylogenetic tree for this family. We use FastTree to calculate neighbour join trees with a local bootstrap based on 100 resamples (shown next to the tree nodes). FastTree calculates approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from our seed or full alignments.

Note: You can also download the data files for the seed, full, NCBI or metagenomics trees.

Curation and family details

This section shows the detailed information about the Pfam family. You can see the definitions of many of the terms in this section in the glossary and a fuller explanation of the scoring system that we use in the scores section of the help pages.

Curation

Seed source:

Alignment kindly provided by SMART

Previous IDs:

none

Type:

Domain

Author:

SMART

Number in seed:

195

Number in full:

2104

Average length of the domain:

177.30 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

21 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

16.68 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

build method: hmmbuild -o /dev/null HMM SEED

search method: hmmsearch -Z 9421015 -E 1000 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	20.9	20.9
Trusted cut-off	21.2	20.9
Noise cut-off	20.7	20.6

Model length:

180

Family (HMM) version:

13

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

Tree controls

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The tree shows the occurrence of this domain across different species. More...

Species trees

We show the species tree in one of two ways. For smaller trees we try to show an interactive representation, which allows you to select specific nodes in the tree and view them as an alignment or as a set of Pfam domain graphics.

Unfortunately we have found that there are problems viewing the interactive tree when the it becomes larger than a certain limit. Furthermore, we have found that Internet Explorer can become unresponsive when viewing some trees, regardless of their size. We therefore show a text representation of the species tree when the size is above a certain limit or if you are using Internet Explorer to view the site.

If you are using IE you can still load the interactive tree by clicking the "Generate interactive tree" button, but please be aware of the potential problems that the interactive species tree can cause.

Interactive tree

For all of the domain matches in a full alignment, we count the number that are found on all sequences in the alignment. This total is shown in the purple box.

We also count the number of unique sequences on which each domain is found, which is shown in green. Note that a domain may appear multiple times on the same sequence, leading to the difference between these two numbers.

Finally, we group sequences from the same organism according to the NCBI code that is assigned by UniProt, allowing us to count the number of distinct sequences on which the domain is found. This value is shown in the pink boxes.

We use the NCBI species tree to group organisms according to their taxonomy and this forms the structure of the displayed tree. Note that in some cases the trees are too large (have too many nodes) to allow us to build an interactive tree, but in most cases you can still view the tree in a plain text, non-interactive representation. Those species which are represented in the seed alignment for this domain are highlighted.

You can use the tree controls to manipulate how the interactive tree is displayed:

show/hide the summary boxes
highlight species that are represented in the seed alignment
expand/collapse the tree or expand it to a given depth
select a sub-tree or a set of species within the tree and view them graphically or as an alignment
save a plain text representation of the tree

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Interactions

There are 5 interactions for this family. More...

RhoGEF SH3_1 PH Ras RasGEF_N

Structures

For those sequences which have a structure in the Protein DataBank, we use the mapping between UniProt, PDB and Pfam coordinate systems from the MSD group, to allow us to map Pfam domains onto UniProt sequences and three-dimensional protein structures. The table below shows the structures on which the RhoGEF domain has been found.

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Family: RhoGEF (PF00621)

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