CBCB scientist Erez Persi publishes a paper in Nature Communications on evolution of repeats in proteins

Tue Nov 22, 2016

CBCB faculty and lead author Erez Persi has published a paper titled “Positive and strongly relaxed purifying selection drive the evolution of repeats in proteins” in Nature Communications on November 18, 2016.

In this paper, horizontal evolution of repeats is shown to be markedly accelerated compared with their divergence from orthologues in closely related species. This observation is universal across the diversity of life forms and implies a biphasic evolutionary regime whereby new copies experience rapid functional divergence under combined effects of strongly relaxed purifying selection and positive selection, followed by fixation and conservation of each individual repeat.