Evolutionary divergence of protein structure and dynamics

J. ECHAVE

Madrid, España

Conferencia; , International Workshop in Memorian of Angel Ortiz “Structural Informatics and Beyond”; 2009

CSIC

Angel Ortiz and coworkers showed by the end of 2005 that the low energy normal modes define the space within which protein structures diverge. On the other hand, these low-energy collective normal modes have been found to be the most conserved in evolution. In this talk, I will discuss these results and propose a simple model that supports the idea that this is the expected behavior of proteins subject to random perturbations: mutations. Natural selection, on the other hand, has to be introduced to account for the differential conservation of protein sequence at different sites.