EVENT : C3BI Seminars
Main speaker : Erich Bornberg-Bauer, from The Westfalian Wilhelms University of Muenster, Germany Date : 09/11/2017 at 02:00 pm Location : Auditorium Francois Jacob – BIME (26) ,Institut Pasteur, Paris
Proteins are the workhorses of the cell and, over billions of years,
they have evolved an amazing plethora of extremely diverse and versatile
structures with equally diverse functions. Therefore, their evolution
echoes the evolution of all forms of life. Evolutionary emergence of
new proteins and transitions between existing ones are widely believed
to be rare or even impossible.
However, recent advances in comparative genomics have repeatedly called
some 10%-30% of all genes without any detectable similarity to existing
proteins. Even after careful scrutiny, some of those “orphan” genes
contain protein coding reading frames with detectable transcription and
translation. Thus some proteins seem to have emerged from previously
non-coding ‘dark genomic matter’. These ‘de novo’ proteins tend to be
disordered, fast evolving, weakly expressed but also rapidly assuming
novel and physiologically important functions. I will review mechanisms
by which ‘de novo’ proteins might be created, under which circumstances
they may become fixed and why they are elusive. I will present a couple
of studies which mostly focus on metazoan genomes.
Due to security policy in Institut Pasteur, please register before if you plan to come to this meeting
