- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: not found
Similar amino acid sequences: chance or common ancestry?
There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The systemic comparison of every newly determined amino acid sequence with all other known sequences may allow a complete reconstruction of the evolutionary events leading to contemporary proteins. But sometimes the surviving similarities are so vague that even computer-based sequence comparisons procedures are unable to validate relationships. In other cases similar sequences may appear in totally alien proteins as a result of mere chance or, occasionally, by the convergent evolution of sequences with special properties.