Seminar 26th January 2010 noon B62 (Boldrewood) Seminar Room 3
Where do new proteins come from?
Dr Richard Edwards
University of Southampton
- Categories
- Bioinformatics, Biomolecular Organisation, Evolution
- Submitter
- Richard Edwards
The importance of gene (and domain) duplication for the generation of novel proteins and protein functions has long been established. Whenever a new genome is sequenced, however, there are always proteins that cannot be assigned to a known protein family and have no detectable homologous proteins in other organisms. Where do these proteins come from? The traditional view is these are proteins that have diverged so much from their last common ancestor with another protein (be it orthologue (i.e. separated by speciation) or paralogue (separated by duplication)) that the homology is no longer detectable but it does exist. Recent bioinformatics analysis of human proteins, however, reveals that de novo generation of novel proteins from non-coding sequences might be more common than we previously thought and many apparently lineage-specific proteins may be genuine.
Mainly this paper:
- Knowles DG & McLysaght A (2009). “Recent de novo origin of human protein-coding genes.” Genome Res. 19:1752-1759. [PMID: 19726446]
With a bit of this one:
- Gordon JL, Byrne KP & Wolfe KH (2009). “Additions, losses, and rearrangements on the evolutionary route from a reconstructed ancestor to the modern Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome.” PLoS Genet. 5: e1000485. [PMID: 19436716]