Evolving Genes and Proteins

Evolving Genes and Proteins

A Symposium Held at the Institute of Microbiology of Rutgers: the State University with Support from the National Science Foundation
1965, Pages 97-166
Evolving Genes and Proteins

Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins

https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4832-2734-4.50017-6 Get rights and content

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Informational macromolecules, or semantides, play a unique role in determining the properties of living matter in the perspectives that differ by the magnitude of time required for the processes involved—the short-timed biochemical reaction, the medium-timed ontogenetic event, and the long-timed evolutionary event. Although the slower processes should be broken down into linked faster processes, if one loses sight of the slower processes one also loses the links between the component faster processes. The relative importance of the contributions to evolution of changes in functional properties of polypeptides through their structural modification on the one hand, and of changes in the timing and the rate of synthesis of these polypeptides on the other hand, constitutes a problem that justifies the study of evolution at the level of informational macromolecules. The evaluation of the amount of differences between two organisms as derived from sequences in structural genes or in their polypeptide translation is likely to lead to quantities different from those obtained on the basis of observations made at any other, higher level of biological integration.

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