One can now make family trees of sequenced proteins. In some cases,
the roots of these trees extend back far enough to be interesting, in
some cases, the divergence of the eukaryotes or before. Since, in
theory, all modern proteins are descendents of a handful of primal
proteins, once you take the ancestries of proteins back far enough,
you should start to see family resemblances between proteins that
don't have much resemblance now, and the beginnings of the Big
Picture: the family tree of ALL proteins.
Do we have enough data to do something like this yet, and if so, what
does the family tree look like?
Dale
Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw at math.mit.edu
--
A double bed and stalwart lover, for sure. These are the riches of the poor.
