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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 29, 2026

Expression, Isolation, and Purification of Soluble and Insoluble Biotinylated Proteins for Nerve Tissue Regeneration

Expression, Isolation, and Purification of Soluble and Insoluble Biotinylated Proteins for Nerve Tissue Regeneration

Published on: January 22, 2014

Protein dispensability and rate of evolution.

A E Hirsh¹, H B Fraser

¹enter for Computational Genetics and Biological Modeling, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, California, USA. aehirsch@stanford.edu

|June 29, 2001

Summary

Protein dispensability, or how essential a protein is to an organism, correlates with its evolutionary rate. This finding, confirmed in yeast and worms, explains previous difficulties in detecting this relationship.

Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Genomics
Molecular biology

Background:

The rate of protein evolution is hypothesized to increase with decreased protein importance to organismal fitness.
This is because less essential proteins are under weaker purifying selection, allowing faster accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations.
Previous studies have failed to confirm this relationship, with some showing no difference in evolutionary rates between essential and non-essential genes.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the relationship between protein dispensability and evolutionary rate using a quantitative measure of dispensability.
To determine if protein dispensability influences evolutionary rate more accurately than a simple essential/non-essential categorization.
To assess the evolutionary conservation of the relationship between protein dispensability and evolutionary rate.

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Rapid, Enzymatic Methods for Amplification of Minimal, Linear Templates for Protein Prototyping using Cell-Free Systems

Published on: June 14, 2021

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Last Updated: Jun 29, 2026

Expression, Isolation, and Purification of Soluble and Insoluble Biotinylated Proteins for Nerve Tissue Regeneration

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Published on: January 22, 2014

Assessment of de novo Protein Synthesis Rates in Caenorhabditis elegans

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Rapid, Enzymatic Methods for Amplification of Minimal, Linear Templates for Protein Prototyping using Cell-Free Systems

Rapid, Enzymatic Methods for Amplification of Minimal, Linear Templates for Protein Prototyping using Cell-Free Systems

Published on: June 14, 2021

Main Methods:

Quantitative assessment of protein dispensability using high-throughput growth assays of single gene deletions in yeast.
Estimation of evolutionary rates through comparative sequence analysis of 21 fully annotated genomes.
Statistical analysis to correlate protein dispensability with evolutionary rates.

Main Results:

A highly significant positive correlation was found between protein dispensability and evolutionary rate.
The relationship is more nuanced than a simple essential versus non-essential dichotomy, explaining previous failed attempts at confirmation.
The identified relationship between protein dispensability and evolutionary rate in yeast is conserved and predictive in other species, such as the nematode worm.

Conclusions:

Protein dispensability is a significant predictor of evolutionary rate.
Quantitative measures of dispensability reveal a conserved relationship between protein function importance and evolutionary speed.
This study reconciles previous conflicting findings and provides a more accurate model for understanding protein evolution.