From: Koonin, Eugene (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E]
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 5:17 PM
To: NLM/NCBI List ncbi-seminar
Cc: Fyodor Kondrashov
Subject: Seminar on April 20

Monday, April 20, 11 AM

Bldg. 38A, B2 conference room

 

Compensatory evolution and evolution of stop codons

 

Fyodor Kondrashov

Bioinformatics and Genomics Programme, Center for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain

 

I will talk about two only slightly connected, ongoing projects. The fist is the study of compensatory evolution in mitochondrial tRNAs. We study the evolutionary dynamics of transitions of different complementary Watson-Crick nucleotide pairs. Compensatory substitutions between WC pairs, for example, AT to GC or GC to AT, appear to be clustered together on the phylogenetic tree, with this clustering being much stronger when the transition occurs through a structurally-weak variant. We interpret these data as evidence that such compensatory evolution traverses a valley of low fitness. Time permitting, I will talk about the evolution of stop codons in pyrrolysine-coding genomes and present some data on the functional noncompatibility of TAG and TGA stop codons.

 

 

 

Eugene V. Koonin, PhD

Senior Investigator

NCBI, NLM, NIH

Bethesda, MD 20894

Bldg. 38a, Rm. 5N503

Telephone: 

301-435-5913 (o)

301-233-7294 (cell)