Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, UK. awilkie@hammer.imm.ox.ac.uk
A detailed sequence comparison of the MSX homeobox family sheds light on its evolution and identifies new conserved motifs. But in the absence of corroborative genetic data, phylogenomics alone can provide only limited insights into the pathogenicity of heterozygous missense substitutions in human genes.