Dr Eugene V Koonin
The transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes was the most radical change in cell organisation since life began, with the largest ever burst of gene duplication and novelty. According to the coevolutionary the...
Divergence of two independently evolving sequences that originated from a common ancestor can be described by two parameters, the asymptotic level of divergence E and the rate r at which this level of divergence ...
Darwin's evolutionary theory could easily explain the evolution of adaptive traits (organs and behavioral patterns) in asexual but not in sexual organisms. Two models, the selfish gene theory and frozen plasti...
Sequence related families of genes and proteins are common in bacterial genomes. In Escherichia coli they constitute over half of the genome. The presence of families and superfamilies of proteins suggest a hi...
The standard genetic code is redundant and has a highly non-random structure. Codons for the same amino acids typically differ only by the nucleotide in the third position, whereas similar amino acids are enco...
It is well-known that Charles Darwin sketched abstract trees of relationship in his 1837 notebook, and depicted a tree in the Origin of Species (1859). Here I attempt to place Darwin's trees in historical context...
The year 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jean-Bapteste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique and the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Lamarck believed that evolution ...
Because bacteria do not have a robust fossil record, attempts to infer the timing of events in their evolutionary history requires comparisons of molecular sequences. This use of molecular clocks is based on t...
The concept of a tree of life is prevalent in the evolutionary literature. It stems from attempting to obtain a grand unified natural system that reflects a recurrent process of species and lineage splittings ...
The elucidation of the dominant role of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in the evolution of prokaryotes led to a severe crisis of the Tree of Life (TOL) concept and intense debates on this subject.
The root of the tree of life has been a holy grail ever since Darwin first used the tree as a metaphor for evolution. New methods seek to narrow down the location of the root by excluding it from branches of t...
While eukaryotes primarily evolve by duplication-divergence expansion (and reduction) of their own gene repertoire with only rare horizontal gene transfers, prokaryotes appear to evolve under both gene duplica...
The arrangement of the amino acids in the genetic code is such that neighbouring codons are assigned to amino acids with similar physical properties. Hence, the effects of translational error are minimized wit...