About the Interrelation of Evolutionary Rate and Protein Age

Abstract

Evolutionary rate and gene age are interrelated when the age of a gene is assessed by the taxonomicdistribution in the gene family. This is because homology detection by sequence comparisonis depending on sequence similarity. We estimate family specific rates of protein evolution for orthologousfamilies with representatives from man, fugu, fly, and worm. In fact, we observe thatyounger proteins tend to evolve faster than older ones. We estimate time points of duplicationevents that gave rise to novel protein functions and show that younger proteins were duplicated more recently than older ones.