Historical contingency and its biophysical basis in glucocorticoid receptor evolution.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how chance historical events shape evolutionary processes is a central goal of evolutionary biology. Direct insights into the extent and causes of evolutionary contingency have been limited to experimental systems, because it is difficult to know what happened in the deep past and to characterize other paths that evolution could have followed. Here we combine ancestral protein reconstruction, directed evolution and biophysical analysis to explore alternative 'might-have-been' trajectories during the ancient evolution of a novel protein function. We previously found that the evolution of cortisol specificity in the ancestral glucocorticoid receptor (GR) was contingent on permissive substitutions, which had no apparent effect on receptor function but were necessary for GR to to

SUBMITTER: Harms MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4447330 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature