Covalent bonds can be generated within and between proteins by an unnatural amino acid (Uaa) reacting with a natural residue through proximity-enabled bioreactivity. Until now, Uaas have been developed to react mainly with cysteine in proteins. Here we genetically encoded an electrophilic Uaa capable of reacting with histidine and lysine, thereby expanding the diversity of target proteins and t...

The genus Remusatia (Araceae) includes four species distributed in the tropical and subtropical Old World. The phylogeny of Remusatia was constructed using parsimony and Bayesian analyses of sequence data from three plastid regions (the rbcL gene, the trnL-trnF intergenic spacer, and the rps16 intron). Phylogenetic analyses of the concatenated plastid data suggested that the monophyly of Remusa...

We propose a detailed model of evolution of exon-intron structure of eukaryotic genes that takes into account gene-specific intron gain and loss rates, branch-specific gain and loss coefficients, invariant sites incapable of intron gain, and rate variability of both gain and loss which is gamma-distributed across sites. We develop an expectationmaximization algorithm to estimate the parameters ...

Unnatural amino acid (UAA) incorporation by amber codon suppression offers scientists a powerful tool to modify the properties of proteins at will. UAA incorporation has been used for a plethora of fundamental research applications and, more recently, also for the selective modification of therapeutic proteins. In this review most recent developments in Escherichia coli codon expansion and, unn...

Scutellaria with about 360 species is one of the largest genera of Lamiaceae. The Iranian highlands accommodate about 40 Scutellaria spp., and is considered as one of the main centers of diversity of the genus. Here, we present a phylogenetic study for 44 species of Scutellaria especially from Iranian highlands, representing major subgeneric taxa, based on nuclear rib...

Introns are a defining feature of eukaryotic genomes, though the mechanism of intron gain or loss is not well understood. Reverse transcription of mRNA followed by homologous recombination with the genome has been posited as a mechanism of intron loss, though little direct evidence of recent loss events has been described to support this model. We find supporting evidence for an mRNA-mediated m...

Loss of introns in plant mitochondrial genes is commonly explained by retroprocessing. Under this model, an mRNA is reverse transcribed and integrated back into the genome, simultaneously affecting the contents of introns and edited sites. To evaluate the extent to which retroprocessing explains intron loss, we analyzed patterns of intron content and predicted RNA editing for whole mitochondria...