Conservation of Protein Structure over Four Billion Years

Conservation of protein structure over four billion years.

Little is known about the evolution of protein structures and the degree of protein structure conservation over planetary time scales. Here, we report the X-ray crystal structures of seven laboratory resurrections of Precambrian thioredoxins dating up to approximately four billion years ago. Despite considerable sequence differences compared with extant enzymes, the ancestral proteins display t...

The First Four Billion Years

Networks of bZIP protein-protein interactions diversified over a billion years of evolution.

Differences in biomolecular sequence and function underlie dramatic ranges of appearance and behavior among species. We studied the basic region-leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factors and quantified bZIP dimerization networks for five metazoan and two single-cell species, measuring interactions in vitro for 2891 protein pairs. Metazoans have a higher proportion of heteromeric bZIP interact...

Morphological evolution of galaxies over the last 8 billion years

In this chapter I describe the motivation behind this Thesis work. I briefly review the main theoretical aspects and the very broad observational scenario, explaining the fundamental goals of this work and summarizing its most relevant contributions to the study of galaxy evolution. The review of previous work, both observational and theoretical, is by no means to be intended as exhaustive nor ...

Over one-half billion years of head conservation? Expression of an ems class gene in Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa).

We report the isolation of an empty spiracles class homeodomain-containing gene, Cn-ems, from the hydrozoan Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, the first gene of this class characterized in a lower metazoan. Cn-ems was found to be expressed in the head of gastrozooids, specifically in endodermal epithelial cells of the taeniolae of the hypostome. Cn-ems is not expressed in gonozooids, which lack tae...