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| Title: | Did evolution leap to create the protein universe? |
| Author: | Burkhard Rost |
| Quote: | B Rost (2002) Current Opinion in Structural Biology, Vol 12:409-416 |
Over 60 organisms from all three kingdoms of life are now entirely sequenced. In many respects the inventory of proteins used in different kingdoms appears surprisingly similar. However, eukaryotes differ from other kingdoms in that they use many long proteins; have more proteins with coiled-coil helices and with regions abundant in regular secondary structure. Particular structural domains are used in many pathways. Nevertheless, one domain tends to occur only once in one particular pathways. Many proteins may not have close homologues in different species (orphans) and there may even be folds that are specific to one species. This view implies that protein fold space is discrete. An alternative model suggests that structure space is continuous in that modern proteins evolved by aggregating fragments of ancient proteins. Either way, after having harvested proteomes by applying standard tools, the challenge now seems to develop better methods for comparative proteomics.