Parsimony in protein evolution.
Pohl found the activation enthalpy and entropy for melting of his mesophilic proteins to be linear in the total number of residues and Privalov and colleagues found this same linearity for the standard heat-capacity, enthalpy and entropy changes in the overall melting equilibria. Despite the small samples these results suggest that mesophiles individually, and as a class, are related through a single standard representative. If so, very extensive convergent evolution has provided both great simplification and very sophisticated goals for genome decoding and quantitative description of protein substructures [R. Lumry, The protein primer, http://www.umn.edu.chem. /groupslumry].
Lumry
Rufus
R
Chemistry Department, University of Minnesota, 207 Pleasant St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. lumry@tc.umn.edu
D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D013816:Thermodynamics
D011506:Proteins