Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 7, 2026

High-throughput Screening for Protein-based Inheritance in S. cerevisiae
Published on: August 8, 2017
Structural determinants of the rate of protein evolution in yeast
Jesse D Bloom1, D Allan Drummond, Frances H Arnold
1Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.
Abstract:
We investigate how a protein's structure influences the rate at which its sequence evolves. Our basic hypothesis is that proteins with highly designable structures (structures that are encoded by many sequences) will evolve more rapidly. Recent theoretical advances argue that structures with a higher density of interresidue contacts are more designable, and we show that high contact density is correlated with an increased rate of sequence evolution in yeast. In addition, we investigate the correlations between the rate of sequence evolution and several other structural descriptors, carefully controlling for the strong effect of expression level on evolutionary rate. Overall, we find that the structural descriptors that we consider appear to explain roughly 10% of the variation in rates of protein evolution in yeast. We also show that despite the well-known trend for buried residues to be more conserved, proteins with a higher fraction of buried residues, nonetheless, tend to evolve their sequences more rapidly. We suggest that this effect is due to the increased designability of structures with more buried residues. Our results provide evidence that protein structure plays an important role in shaping the rate of sequence evolution and provide evidence to support recent theoretical advances linking structural designability to contact density.
Related Concept Videos
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
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...
Conservation of Protein Domains Over Different Proteins
A limited set of protein domains often duplicate and recombine during evolution. These domains can be organized in different combinations to form...
Bacterial RNA Polymerase
In most genes, the transcription site is a single base present upstream of the coding sequence. Though RNAP is a catalytically efficient enzyme, it does not recognize...

