In article <2ste30$lef at nexus.uiowa.edu>, tajik at everest.radiology.uiowa.edu
(Jehangir K. Tajik) writes:
> I was wondering if anyone had ideas on how a particular receptor evolved for a
> given ligand. I think I read somewhere a couple years back that the receptor
> for a given ligand was transcribed from the oppsite DNA strand that the ligand
> was transcribed from. Any ideas?
This was suggested some time ago. The idea was that the ligand and receptor
binding site were originally coded by opposite strands of the *same gene*
(or exon at least) and that they paired because of a relationship between the
genetic code and amino acid hydrophobicity.
See for example a letter by R.Brentani to TIBS (1990) 15:463 and a review
by J.E.Blalock (1990) Trends in Biotech 8:140-144.
I have not noticed anything on this idea since then. The regions that are
supposed to match are very short DNA sequences translated to amino acid
hydrophobicities. Seems to me it would be hard to pick out a significant signal
by sequence analysis.
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