Pseudokinases are catalytically-deficient pseudoenzyme[1] variants of protein kinases that are represented in all kinomes across the kingdoms of life.
[10][8][11][12][13] Several pseudokinase-containing families are found in the human kinome, including the Tribbles pseudokinases, which are at the interface between kinase and ubiquitin E3 ligase signalling.
[14][15][16] The human pseudokinases (and their pseudophosphatase cousins) are implicated in a wide variety of diseases,[17][18] which has made them potential drug targets and antitargets).
[24] FAM20A is implicated in periodontal disease, and serves to control the catalytic activity of FAM20C, an important physiological casein kinase that controls phosphorylation of proteins in the Golgi apparatus that are destined for secretion,[25] such as the milk protein casein.
A comprehensive evolutionary analysis confirms that pseudokinases group into multiple subfamilies, and these are found in the annotated kinome of organisms across the kingdoms of life, including prokaryotes, archaea and all eukaryotic lineages with an annotated proteome; this data is searchable in ProKino (http://vulcan.cs.uga.edu/prokino/about/browser).