Talk:CH391L/S13/Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction

• Gabriel Wu 16:59, 18 February 2013 (EST): Remove the cost and methods of gene synthesis (or just reference the dna assembly section we've already gone over). Expand the codon optimization section (unless this fits better in somewhere else).

• Gabriel Wu 16:59, 18 February 2013 (EST): How does Pauling's proposal for ancestral gene construction relate to the actual discovery of DNA structure?

• Benjamin Gilman 13:21, 21 February 2013 (EST): The Pauling and Zuckerkandl paper came out when the only protein sequence information we had came from limited peptide sequencing methods like Edman degradation (N-terminal sequencing). You might add something about the shift to using DNA or RNA sequences to infer protein sequence once techniques like Maxam-Gilbert and Sanger sequencing showed up in the '70s.

• Kevin Baldridge 17:00, 18 February 2013 (EST):How do the methods here compare with those used for phylogenetic placement based on ribosomal RNA sequences?

• Gabriel Wu 17:06, 18 February 2013 (EST): Can you include a little more detail in your figures? At least give some detail about the methods used to determine time and explain the acronyms (e.g. PNCA, GNCA, etc).
  • Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 21:36, 21 February 2013 (EST): Adding to Gabriel's comment I already did some editing, but it would be better if you either define the acronyms and then use them or keep using the corresponding terminology.
• Gabriel Wu 17:06, 18 February 2013 (EST): What's the oldest intact DNA? What's the oldest speciesn being sequenced today?
  • Catherine I. Mortensen 23:19, 20 February 2013 (EST): I'm not sure what the oldest intact DNA is but I did find an article about the oldest living relative to eukaryotes. It's protozoan that is thought to have evolved one billion years ago. Apparently it doesn't fit into any specific kingdom. http://www.livescience.com/19955-ancient-protist-kingdom.html
• Catherine I. Mortensen 15:05, 21 February 2013 (EST):Has anyone heard of H. Salinarum?
  • Benjamin Gilman 16:47, 21 February 2013 (EST): I know there's some debate about it, but it's possible that at least one sample of an ancient H. Salinarum ancestor is >100 million years old. A lot of people were skeptical because the genome didn't seem that different from those of current halophilic archaea, but at least some regions didn't match anything we know of now. I wonder if it's reasonable to assume that once they're adapted to high salt, halophiles might evolve more slowly because they face less competition.

• Gabriel Wu 17:08, 18 February 2013 (EST): Separate topic on sequencing wooly mammoths and neanderthals?
  • Jeffrey E. Barrick 18:30, 20 February 2013 (EST):We could call that topic Ancestral organism resurrection. It could also talk about synthesizing the 1918 Spanish flu. Here's a review that might help with that topic.

• Kevin Baldridge 17:10, 18 February 2013 (EST):On the topic of general to specific evolution, is there any consideration for hypermodified amino acids? Maybe the ancient proteins had post-translational modifications in the proteins that adjusted the specificity, but we don't know about it from the genetic sequence for the protein.

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 17:16, 18 February 2013 (EST):Add a picture of the fluorescent proteins (take one from Matz Lab website?
  • Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 21:36, 21 February 2013 (EST):Expanding on this, a visual on how the process is carried (a pipeline image) would be more useful for the reader.

• Gabriel Wu 17:20, 18 February 2013 (EST): From Andre: Discussion of Red Queen hypothesis and how ancestral gene reconstruction can show us evolution of interactions between host and virus proteins.
  • Jeffrey E. Barrick 18:30, 20 February 2013 (EST):If it's specific proteins I'd put it in this topic. If it's whole viruses, I'd kick to it a whole-organism topic.

• Siddharth Das 19:24, 19 February 2012(EST): With even the most powerful statistics tools and rigorous mathematics, how useful is this technology in terms of evolutionary studies, since it seems the genes themselves are inaccurate representations (varying mutation rate for the past million year, etc)? Furthermore, is it safe to assume that the genetic code was as conserved as it is today? There are exceptions even now; for example, in the fungus Candida, CUG codes for serine instead of leucine. On a different note, the wiki is very well organized.

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 18:37, 20 February 2013 (EST):Please add the titles of papers in the bibliography on your own as is done in other topics. You might also send feedback to OWW to tell them the bibio extension is broken to see if someday they will fix it.

• Neil R Gottel 16:31, 21 February 2013 (EST):This seems to be a tricky topic to find a link to iGEM, since I'm not finding any teams who have incorporated this into their projects. Therefore, we should do it. It also has an obvious tie-in to BEACON (evolution of proteins!), so that makes it doubly worth pursuing. Since these analyses tend to give higher-temp versions of proteins, we could potentially use this as a starting point for making heat-stable versions of various biotech/industrial enzymes, then tweaking/evolving to increase efficiency. The actual goal is to make some sort of new protocol that others can follow, and therefore cite when we publish in Nature. Or Science, I'm not picky.
• Benjamin Gilman 16:51, 21 February 2013 (EST): Is "RetroBioBricks" too hard to say?
• Alvaro E. Rodriguez M. 21:39, 21 February 2013 (EST):One thing that seems to be missing in most topics currently is technical limitation to approaches like this. i.e. Do you need 2 sequences of a gene/protein or 10 to make it work.