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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Examination of Thymic Positive and Negative Selection by Flow Cytometry
Published on: October 8, 2012
Positive selection of tyrosine loss in metazoan evolution
Chris Soon Heng Tan1, Adrian Pasculescu, Wendell A Lim
1Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto M5G 1X5, Canada.
Abstract:
John Nash showed that within a complex system, individuals are best off if they make the best decision that they can, taking into account the decisions of the other individuals. Here, we investigate whether similar principles influence the evolution of signaling networks in multicellular animals. Specifically, by analyzing a set of metazoan species we observed a striking negative correlation of genomically encoded tyrosine content with biological complexity (as measured by the number of cell types in each organism). We discuss how this observed tyrosine loss correlates with the expansion of tyrosine kinases in the evolution of the metazoan lineage and how it may relate to the optimization of signaling systems in multicellular animals. We propose that this phenomenon illustrates genome-wide adaptive evolution to accommodate beneficial genetic perturbation.
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