Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 26, 2026

Enzymatic Cascade Reactions for the Synthesis of Chiral Amino Alcohols from L-lysine
Published on: February 16, 2018
Complex evolution of orthologous and paralogous decarboxylase genes
L E Sáenz-de-Miera1, F J Ayala
1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA. deglsm@unileon.es
Abstract:
The decarboxylases are involved in neurotransmitter synthesis in animals, and in pathways of secondary metabolism in plants. Different decarboxylase proteins are characterized for their different substrate specificities, but are encoded by homologous genes. We study, within a maximum-likelihood framework, the evolutionary relationships among dopa decarboxylase (Ddc), histidine decarboxylase (Hdc) and alpha-methyldopa hypersensitive (amd) in animals, and tryptophan decarboxylase (Wdc) and tyrosine decarboxylase (Ydc) in plants. The evolutionary rates are heterogeneous. There are differences between paralogous genes in the same lineages: 4.13 x 10(-10) nucleotide substitutions per site per year in mammalian Ddc vs. 1.95 in Hdc; between orthologous genes in different lineages, 7.62 in dipteran Ddc vs. 4.13 in mammalian Ddc; and very large temporal variations in some lineages, from 3.7 up to 54.9 in the Drosophila Ddc lineage. Our results are inconsistent with the molecular clock hypothesis.
Related Concept Videos
Gene Families
Occasionally these regions can be adapted to take on new roles within the organism, becoming novel genes...
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon has three reading...
Loss of Carboxy Group as CO2: Decarboxylation of Malonic Acid Derivatives
Protein Families
Evolution of New Traits in Microbes
Protein Complexes with Interchangeable Parts
The SCF ubiquitin ligase is a protein complex of five individual proteins. This complex attaches ubiquitin to other target proteins to mark them for degradation. In order to...

