Speeding Up Sequence Alignment Across the Tree of Life
Published:19 Apr.2021 Source:Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institutes of Developmental Biology in Tübingen and the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility in Garching develops new search capabilities that will allow to compare the biochemical makeup of different species from across the tree of life. Its combination of accuracy and speed is hitherto unrivalled.
Humans share many sequences of nucleotides that make up our genes with other species -- with pigs in particular, but also with mice and even bananas. Accordingly, some proteins in our bodies -- strings of amino acids assembled according to the blueprint of the genes -- can also be the same as (or similar to) some proteins in other species. These similarities might sometimes indicate that two species have a common ancestry, or they may simply come about if the evolutionary need for a certain feature or molecular function happens to arise in the two species.