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Free keywords:
protein evolution, evolutionary rates, gene age, gene duplication
Abstract:
Evolutionary rate and gene age are interrelated when the age of a gene is assessed by the taxonomic
distribution in the gene family. This is because homology detection by sequence comparison
is depending on sequence similarity. We estimate family specific rates of protein evolution for orthologous
families with representatives from man, fugu, fly, and worm. In fact, we observe that
younger proteins tend to evolve faster than older ones. We estimate time points of duplication
events that gave rise to novel protein functions and show that younger proteins were duplicated
more recently than older ones.
