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Updated: Apr 27, 2026

Using Phylogenetic Analysis to Investigate Eukaryotic Gene Origin
Published on: August 14, 2018
Merging molecular mechanism and evolution: theory and computation at the interface of biophysics and evolutionary
Adrian W R Serohijos1, Eugene I Shakhnovich1
1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Abstract:
The variation among sequences and structures in nature is both determined by physical laws and by evolutionary history. However, these two factors are traditionally investigated by disciplines with different emphasis and philosophy-molecular biophysics on one hand and evolutionary population genetics in another. Here, we review recent theoretical and computational approaches that address the crucial need to integrate these two disciplines. We first articulate the elements of these approaches. Then, we survey their contribution to our mechanistic understanding of molecular evolution, the polymorphisms in coding region, the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of mutations, the observed folding stability of proteins in nature, and the distribution of protein folds in genomes.
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