Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Protein Evolution

Going Back to Go Forward

Helen Pearson in Nature News reported how University of Oregon, researcher Joe Thornton and his colleagues are analyzing proteins that are hundreds of millions of years old in an attempt to better understand how organisms evolved. Thornton tracked the genes for steroid hormone receptors from several living organisms back through their evolutionary trees to determine the most likely common ancestor, and then built the gene and inserted it into cells that could manufacture the ancient protein. S. Pelech comments that careful alignment of the amino acids in functional protein domains might reveal what the likely primary structures of these domains resembled when they first appeared in organisms on this planet. Comparison of such consensus sequences for each defined protein domain can further provide clues as to how they may have evolved from each other and ultimately how the hundreds of functional domains found within all of the known proteins may have emerged from a very small number. He notes that this approach has been successfully usedby Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation to identify glutamine tRNA synthetase as the precursor of the typical protein kinases and the choline/ethanolamine kinases. Read More...