In article <lawrence-180494131124 at ls-12.biology.utah.edu> lawrence at bioscience
.utah.edu (Jeff Lawrence) writes:
=>stuff deleted
> the job of
>evolutionary biologists is to sort the meaningful patterns from the
>background noise. this is especially difficult in molecular evolution, as
>one can imagine, in that the ancestry of homologous characters may be
>difficult to ascertain (hard to line up sequences to identify base position
>that are identical by descent), and there are only four character states
>(G,A,T,C). Despite these difficulties, molecular changes can be sorted out
>to identify gene families and trace their lineages (for example, globin
>genes among mammals or transposase genes among Eukarya and Bacteria).
>jeff
I would like to point out that indels (insertions and deletions) are another
important "character state" that could be utilized for investigating the
evolutionary ancestry of genes. Although I have not seen much literature
referring to the utility of indels for evolutionary studies, its clear that
they could provide an important "marker" of ancestry, in that they are not as
frequently/easily reversible as are single base pair changes. In particular,
when they occur within a region that encodes a highly conserved peptide, such
rare events provide markers that could survive for extensive evolutionary
periods. Our work on MADS box genes of spruce has reveal one potential
indel within the highly conserved DNA binding region, that maybe
representative of this. If there is any interest in this aspect of molecular
evolution, I would be happy to provide additional information about this gene
segment.
Bob
