Evolution of protein families: is it possible to distinguish between domains of life?

ABSTRACT: Understanding evolutionary relationships between species can shed new light into the rooting of the tree of life and the origin of eukaryotes, thus, resulting in a long standing interest in accurately assessing evolutionary parameters at time scales on the order of a billion of years. Prior work suggests large variability in molecular substitution rates, however, we still do not know whether such variability is due to species-specific trends at a genomic scale, or whether it can be attributed to the fluctuations inherent in any stochastic process. Here, we study the statistical properties of gene and protein-family sizes in order to quantify the long time scale evolutionary differences and similarities across species. We first determine the protein families of 209 species of bacteria and 2

SUBMITTER: Sales-Pardo M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2441766 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature