Phylogeny congruence analysis and isozyme classification: The pyruvate kinase system

As the isozymes of pyruvate kinase (PK) are best known in rats, the characteristics of the rat isozymes are generally used to classify the PK isozymes in other species. Given the discrepancies generated by this classification by analogy, we evaluated a classification using a phylogeny congruence analysis of the compositional relatedness of vertebrate PK's. While our phylogenetic analysis confirmed the well established separation of the L and R isozymes from the K and M isozymes, its power became most evident in the identification of non-orthologous (or variant) forms of PK. Our analysis emphasized the uniqueness of chicken liver PK which cannot be classified either as a K or an L isozyme, confirmed that tumors express a variety of forms of PK, and indicated that lungs systematically express PK's which are not orthologous with PK's from other tissues. The determination of orthology by the phylogeny congruence analysis assumes that the structural data from different sources are subject to similar methodological error. However, we cannot reject the possibility that an apparent lack of orthology be due to artifacts during purification and analysis.