We Remember Memorizing That
21/12/10 19:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 19:08.
Tracking the evolutionary histories of 4,000 gene families is an exciting step towards the more ambitious goal of deducing the origins of life. A greater focus should actually be made on the functional domains found in the proteins encoded by genes. Most biologists think of the tree of life from the standpoint of how all living creatures on the planet today are descendants from a few simple life forms. However, molecular paleontology may soon allow us to uncover how the hundreds of functional domains found within all of the known proteins may have evolved from a very small number. This is one of the most tantalizing dividends of the genome-wide sequencing efforts for very diverse organisms. By careful comparison of the consensus amino acid sequences of each functional protein domain with all of the others, it is possible to identify common ancestors. At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we have recently been able to identify the predecessor of all of the typical eukaryotic protein kinases by this approach. We shall shortly be releasing these findings next month publicly at the Keystone Symposium: The Evolution of Protein Phosphorylation at the end of January. By applying such a strategy in a much more comprehensive effort, the first glimpses of molecular tree of life may not be too far away. This will offer insights into what the earliest cells on this planet may have been like in terms of their biochemistry.
Link to the original blog post.
Tracking the evolutionary histories of 4,000 gene families is an exciting step towards the more ambitious goal of deducing the origins of life. A greater focus should actually be made on the functional domains found in the proteins encoded by genes. Most biologists think of the tree of life from the standpoint of how all living creatures on the planet today are descendants from a few simple life forms. However, molecular paleontology may soon allow us to uncover how the hundreds of functional domains found within all of the known proteins may have evolved from a very small number. This is one of the most tantalizing dividends of the genome-wide sequencing efforts for very diverse organisms. By careful comparison of the consensus amino acid sequences of each functional protein domain with all of the others, it is possible to identify common ancestors. At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we have recently been able to identify the predecessor of all of the typical eukaryotic protein kinases by this approach. We shall shortly be releasing these findings next month publicly at the Keystone Symposium: The Evolution of Protein Phosphorylation at the end of January. By applying such a strategy in a much more comprehensive effort, the first glimpses of molecular tree of life may not be too far away. This will offer insights into what the earliest cells on this planet may have been like in terms of their biochemistry.
Link to the original blog post.