David T.F Dryden*, Andrew R Thomson and John H White
-Author Affiliations
School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh The King's Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JJ, UK
Author for correspondence (david.dryden@ed.ac.uk)
Abstract
We suggest that the vastness of protein sequence space is actually completely explorable during the populating of the Earth by life by considering upper and lower limits for the number of organisms, genome size, mutation rate and the number of functionally distinct classes of amino acids. We conclude that rather than life having explored only an infinitesimally small part of sequence space in the last 4 Gyr, it is instead quite plausible for all of functional protein sequence space to have been explored and that furthermore, at the molecular level, there is no role for contingency.
Keywords:
protein sequence evolution contingency
Footnotes
Received February 27, 2008.
Accepted March 25, 2008.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
protein sequence evolution contingency
Footnotes
Received February 27, 2008.
Accepted March 25, 2008.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright © 2008 The Royal Society
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