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Updated: Aug 10, 2026

Protein WISDOM: A Workbench for In silico De novo Design of BioMolecules
Published on: July 25, 2013
Did evolution leap to create the protein universe?
1CUBIC, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, 650 West 168th Street, BB217, New York, NY 10032, USA. rost@columbia.edu
Abstract:
The genomes of over 60 organisms from all three kingdoms of life are now entirely sequenced. In many respects, the inventory of proteins used in different kingdoms appears surprisingly similar. However, eukaryotes differ from other kingdoms in that they use many long proteins, and have more proteins with coiled-coil helices and with regions abundant in regular secondary structure. Particular structural domains are used in many pathways. Nevertheless, one domain tends to occur only once in one particular pathway. Many proteins do not have close homologues in different species (orphans) and there could even be folds that are specific to one species. This view implies that protein fold space is discrete. An alternative model suggests that structure space is continuous and that modern proteins evolved by aggregating fragments of ancient proteins. Either way, after having harvested proteomes by applying standard tools, the challenge now seems to be to develop better methods for comparative proteomics.
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