From Protein Domains to Genome : Evolution and on to New Strategies for Comparative Genomics - Erich Bornberg-Bauer

Erich Bornberg-Bauer - School of Biological Sciences, The Westfalian Wilhelms University of Münster, Germany

Lundi 24 novembre 2014 à 10 h 30

IMPMC, Université P. et M. Curie, 4, Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris

Salle de conférence, 4e étage, Tour 22-23, Salle 1

Abstract

Over two decades ago it was established that proteins evolve to a large extent by modular rearrangements of domains, their evolutionary, functional and structural building blocks. Very little, however, has this knowledge been used for analysing genome evolution and adaptive processes beyond the classical methods of sequence based substitutions. Based on analyses of several phylogenetic groups, such as insects, fungi, vertebrates, floral plants and diatoms, we showed that the major mechanisms which drive the creation of new domain arrangements are gene duplications, fusions and terminal losses of domains. We determine rates of these processes and demonstrate that domain loss
is frequent but follows a fairly stochastic process while emergence of new domains is very rare but associated to strong adaptive processes such as environmental adaptation and development. We show how this knowledge can be used for fast and memory efficient algorithms for homology detection (even when complicated rearrangements such as circular permutations are involved), genome rearrangements and phylogeny reconstruction.