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Distance is not just a matter of time

Posted by ShiHuang on 17 Oct 2009 at 07:48 GMT

You said: "We observe, among many statistically significant correlations, that slowly evolving proteins tend to be regulated by more transcription factors, deficient in predicted structural disorder, involved in characteristic biological functions (such as translation), biased in amino acid composition, and are generally more abundant, more essential, and enriched for interaction partners. "

Your work is the latest for the idea that how a gene is used (epigenetics) puts constraint on gene mutations or evolutionary rate (1, 2). A gene is used in more ways in complex organisms than in simple ones and encounters more constraints. This reality is unfortunately not taken into account in the modern evolution theory theory.

Ref.
1. Huang, S. (2008) Histone methylation and the initiation of cancer. Cancer Epigenetics, Ed. Tollefsbol, T., CRC Books.
2. Huang, S. (2009) Inverse relationship between genetic diversity and epigenetic complexity, Preprint available at Nature Precedings. http://precedings.nature....

No competing interests declared.