Computational Analysis Of Genome Evolution

Computational Analysis of Genome Evolution

Computer Analysis Of Genetic Macromolecules: Structure, Function And Evolution

Molecular biology and genetics are fast-growing fields with significant results and findings being reported virtually every day. Raw data from the wet lab accumulate at an astonishing rate, making it necessary to analyze the biological data with the use of computers. This book reveals how the current challenges of molecular biology and genetics are met with computer and mathematical treatments. A combined effort of the Computational Genetics and Biophysics Group (Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, USA), the Theoretical Molecular Genetics (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia) and the Bioinformatics Group (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy), many of these findings are firsthand discoveries made by these groups. The book emphasizes the fundamental principles of the structural-functional organization of the 3 major classes of genetic macromolecules: DNA, RNA and proteins. It also introduces universally applicable theoretical principles into the enormous realm of raw data and develops an integrative, theoretical computer approach to the analysis of these macromolecules to gain insights into the complexities of their function and evolution.

Origin and Evolution of New Gene Functions

Although interest in evolutionary novelties can be that these different mechanisms cooperate in the mak traced back to the time of Darwin, the appreciation ing of new genes. In the second phase of new gene evolution, conventional models of new gene evolution, and systematical experimental pursuit of the origin and evolution of new gene functions did not appear for example by gene duplication, held that the muta until the early years of last decade. Since the 1970s, tions fixed in the early stages of the new genes are Susumu Ohno, Walter Gilbert, and others from the assumed to be neutral or nearly neutral. However, it area of evolutionary genetics have made pioneer ef appears that the force of Darwinian positive selection has been detectably strong from the outset in avail forts to elaborate possibilities for major biological mechanisms, for example, gene duplication and exon able population genetic studies of young genes created through the process of exon recombination. This may shuffling, by which new gene functions could arise. However, the problem of new gene evolution did not account for a common phenomenon in phylogenetic catch significant attention among biologists generally analyses of genes with changed functions: the early even recently. One of the reasons was the lack of ex stages of such genes are usually associated with accel perimental or observational systems for investigating erated substitution rates. Nonetheless, a more general factual details of the 'birth' process of new genes.