MOTIVATION We address the question of whether there exists an effective evolutionary model of amino-acid substitution that forms a metric-distance function. There is always a trade-off between speed and sensitivity among competing computational methods of determining sequence homology. A metric model of evolution is a prerequisite for the development of an entire class of fast sequence analysis...

Models of amino acid substitution present challenges beyond those often faced with the analysis of DNA sequences. The alignments of amino acid sequences are often small, whereas the number of parameters to be estimated is potentially large when compared with the number of free parameters for nucleotide substitution models. Most approaches to the analysis of amino acid alignments have focused on...

So I’ve just suggested that the neutral theory of molecular evolution explains quite a bit, but it also ignores quite a bit. The derivations we did assumed that all substitutions are equally likely to occur, because they are selectively neutral. That isn’t plausible. We need look no further than sickle cell anemia to see an example of a protein polymorphism in which a single amino acid differen...

So I’ve just suggested that the neutral theory of molecular evolution explains quite a bit, but it also ignores quite a bit. The derivations we did assumed that all substitutions are equally likely to occur, because they are selectively neutral. That isn’t plausible. We need look no further than sickle cell anemia to see an example of a protein polymorphism in which a single amino acid differen...

Methods for alignment of protein sequences typically measure similarity by using a substitution matrix with scores for all possible exchanges of one amino acid with another. The most widely used matrices are based on the Dayhoff model of evolutionary rates. Using a different approach, we have derived substitution matrices from about 2000 blocks of aligned sequence segments characterizing more t...

BACKGROUND A mechanistic codon substitution model, in which each codon substitution rate is proportional to the product of a codon mutation rate and the average fixation probability depending on the type of amino acid replacement, has advantages over nucleotide, amino acid, and empirical codon substitution models in evolutionary analysis of protein-coding sequences. It can approximate a wide ra...

In the current study, we examined the association between polymorphisms in the O(6)-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase gene (MGMT) and the risk for cervical carcinoma. We prospectively selected 1012 patients, including 539 with carcinoma and 473 with cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia and 800 healthy women from five hospitals in Zhejiang Province, China. Three single-nucleotide polymorphisms ...

In an attempt to quantify the rates of protein sequence divergence in Drosophila, we have devised a screen to differentiate between slow and fast evolving genes. We find that over one-third of randomly drawn cDNAs from a Drosophila melanogaster library do not cross-hybridize with Drosophila virilis DNA, indicating that they evolve with a very high rate. To determine the evolutionary characteris...