The amino acid sequence of satyr tragopan lysozyme and its activity was analyzed. Carboxymethylated lysozyme was digested with trypsin and the resulting peptides were sequenced. The established amino acid sequence had three amino acid substitutions at positions 103 (Asn to Ser), 106 (Ser to Asn), and 121 (His to Gln) comparing with Temminck's tragopan lysozyme and five amino acid substitutions ...

The large numbers of protein sequences generated by whole genome sequencing projects require rapid and accurate methods of annotation. The detection of homology through computational sequence analysis is a powerful tool in determining the complex evolutionary and functional relationships that exist between proteins. Homology search algorithms employ amino acid substitution matrices to detect si...

The rate at which genomes adapt to environmental changes and the prevalence of adaptive processes in molecular evolution are two controversial issues in current evolutionary genetics. Previous attempts to quantify the genome-wide rate of adaptation through amino-acid substitution have revealed a surprising diversity of patterns, with some species (e.g. Drosophila) experiencing a very high adapt...

The property of an amino acid is different according to the variation of protein secondary structure. Each central amino acid corresponds to several conditional probability distributions of amino acid on the specific positions surrounding it. Based on this property, we get amino acid distance matrices for helix, sheet, coil and turn conformation. It is observed that, for different protein secon...

Phylogenetic reconstruction is regarded as a problem of statistical inference. Because statistical inferences cannot be drawn in the absence of a probability model, the use of a model of nucleotide or amino-acid substitution – an evolutionary model – becomes necessary when using DNA or amino-acid sequences to estimate phylogenetic relationships among organisms. Evolutionary models are sets of a...

Antibodies are glycoproteins produced by the immune system as a dynamically adaptive line of defense against invading pathogens. Very elegant and specific mutational mechanisms allow B lymphocytes to produce a large and diversified repertoire of antibodies, which is modified and enhanced throughout all adulthood. One of these mechanisms is somatic hypermutation, which stochastically mutates nuc...

What are the major forces governing protein evolution? A common view is that proteins with strong structural and functional requirements evolve more slowly than proteins with weak constraints, because a stringent negative selection pressure limits the number of substitutions. In contrast, Graur claimed that the substitution rate of a protein is mainly determined by its amino acid composition an...

MOTIVATION Protein sequence searching and alignment are fundamental tools of modern biology. Alignments are assessed using their similarity scores, essentially the sum of substitution matrix scores over all pairs of aligned amino acids. We previously proposed a generative probabilistic method that yields scores that take the sequence context around each aligned residue into account. This method...