Protein biophysics explains why highly abundant proteins evolve slowly.

ABSTRACT: The consistent observation across all kingdoms of life that highly abundant proteins evolve slowly demonstrates that cellular abundance is a key determinant of protein evolutionary rate. However, other empirical findings, such as the broad distribution of evolutionary rates, suggest that additional variables determine the rate of protein evolution. Here, we report that under the global selection against the cytotoxic effects of misfolded proteins, folding stability (ΔG), simultaneous with abundance, is a causal variable of evolutionary rate. Using both theoretical analysis and multiscale simulations, we demonstrate that the anticorrelation between the premutation ΔG and the arising mutational effect (ΔΔG), purely biophysical in origin, is a necessary requirement for abundance-evolutionary

SUBMITTER: Serohijos AW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3533372 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature