Month: September 2022

MOLECULAR EVOLUTION. "Our results suggest that, whereas convergent molecular evolution is relatively common, adaptive molecular convergence linked to phenotypic convergence is comparatively rare." https://lnkd.in/eBMUXjN View in LinkedIn

FISH ANTIFREEZE. "Antarctic notothenioid fishes and several northern cods are phylogenetically distant (in different orders and superorders), yet produce near-identical antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGPs) to survive in their respective freezing environments." https://lnkd.in/ewcyhgC View in LinkedIn

INDEPENDENT ANTIFREEZE MOLECULES. "Characterizations of the AFGP genes from notothenioids and the Arctic cod show that their AFGPs are both encoded by a family of polyprotein genes, with each gene encoding multiple AFGP molecules linked in tandem by small cleavable spacers. Despite these apparent similarities, detailed analyses of the AFGP gene sequences and substructures provide strong evidence that AFGPs in these two polar fishes in fact evolved independently." (AFGP = antifreeze glycoproteins). " " https://lnkd.in/ewcyhgC View in LinkedIn

"GLUTAMATE is an indispensable neurotransmitter...glutamate recognition requires an arginine residue in the base of the binding site, which originated at least three distinct times according to phylogenetic analysis. Most remarkably, the arginine emerged on the principal face of the binding site in the Lophotrochozoan lineage, but 65 amino acids upstream, on the complementary face, in the Ecdysozoan lineage." https://lnkd.in/eTM3d8x View in LinkedIn

HOMOLOGS. "Detection of Convergent and Parallel Evolution at the Amino Acid Sequence Level. Adaptive evolution at the molecular level can be studied by detecting convergent and parallel evolution at the amino acid sequence level. For a set of homologous protein sequences, the ancestral amino acids at all interior nodes of the phylogenetic tree of the proteins can be statistically inferred." https://lnkd.in/eeQXHPj View in LinkedIn

LYSOZYME. "We reanalyzed the stomach lysozyme sequences of foregut fermenters and found that parallel evolution is statistically significant, whereas convergent evolution is not well supported." http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/5/527.short View in LinkedIn

RARE POINT MUTATION EFFECTS. "Phenotypic convergence has indeed been connected to identical replacements of single amino acids within the encoded product of a protein-coding gene occurring independently in unrelated taxa; however, such examples are rare." https://lnkd.in/eBMUXjN View in LinkedIn

MINIMAL UNIT OF EVOLUTION. "A domain is the smallest unit of evolution by the definition from the SCOP database of known protein structures. Small proteins consist of a single domain, and some larger proteins consist of more than one domain. A part of a protein is only considered a domain in its own right if it is observed elsewhere in nature on its own or in combination with different partner domains." https://lnkd.in/efF6yTb View in LinkedIn

RARE CONVERGENCE. "It is clear that the vast majority of sequences in the genomes have domain architectures which have arisen by evolutionary descent rather than due to functional necessity. In short, convergent evolution of domain architectures is rare...we conclude that between 0.4 and 4% of sequences are involved in convergent evolution of domain architectures, and expect the actual number to be close to the lower bound." http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/8/1464.full View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS the fragment on evolutionary convergence. The dual mechanisms of selective pressures and genetic variation, combined with millions of generations over time, constitute an incomparable bio-innovation machine, as evidenced by the endless examples of convergence in nature. With simultaneous solution of major niche problems by different species also comes a fountain of biological diversity. Next weekend, evolutionary simplification. View in LinkedIn