Alternative evolutionary histories in the sequence space of an ancient protein.

ABSTRACT: To understand why molecular evolution turned out as it did, we must characterize not only the path that evolution followed across the space of possible molecular sequences but also the many alternative trajectories that could have been taken but were not. A large-scale comparison of real and possible histories would establish whether the outcome of evolution represents an optimal state driven by natural selection or the contingent product of historical chance events; it would also reveal how the underlying distribution of functions across sequence space shaped historical evolution. Here we combine ancestral protein reconstruction with deep mutational scanning to characterize alternative histories in the sequence space around an ancient transcription factor, which evolved a novel biological

SUBMITTER: Starr TN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6214350 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature