Origin of recent genes, an approach with deteriorated PSSM matrices and protein domain architectures

Abstract

The origin of new genes is an important process during the evolution of organisms because they provide critical sources for evolutionary innovation. The approaches that show how these new genes arise and acquire new functions in the course of evolution is of fundamental importance. However, even if there are multiple sources of information about the domain architecture, there is not yet an available database that relates the genes and their phylogenies, considering the architectures. Moreover, the methodologies used in current databases of orthologous genes fail to cluster homologous genes from distant groups where the similarity between genes is insufficient. This project consists of the implementation of methodologies and computational resources that allow us to model the origin of recent protein, based on two aspects: (I) detecting its origin from exon shuffling (as molecular mechanism, manifested by formation new architectures from pre-existing domain) and (II) detecting the source from ancestral gene, evidenced by PSSM matrices created by software PSI-BLAST, and confirmed by analysis of overlapping structural topologies. (AU)