Gene duplications are prevalent in plants, and functional divergence subsequent to duplication may be linked with the occurrence of novel phenotypes in plant evolution. Here, we examine the functional divergence of Arabidopsis thaliana APETALA1 (AP1) and FRUITFULL (FUL), which arose via a duplication correlated with the origin of the core eudicots. Both AP1 and FUL play a role in floral meriste...

quorum sensing controls the luminescence of vibrio fischeri through the transcriptional activator luxr and the specific autoinducer signal produced by luxi. amino acid sequences of these two genes were analyzed using bioinformatics tools. luxi consists of 193 amino acids and appears to contain five α-helices and six ß-sheets when analyzed by sspro8. luxi belongs to the autoinducer synthetase fa...

Voltage-gated ion channels (VGCs) mediate selective diffusion of ions across cell membranes to enable many vital cellular processes. Three-dimensional structure data are lacking for VGC proteins; hence, to better understand their function, there is a need to identify the conserved motifs using sequence analysis methods. In this study, we have used a profile-to-profile alignment method to identi...