User:J. C. Martinez-Garcia/Notebook/HMS Activities/2008/10/14

Mutations and Redundancy

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The Pilpel Meeting Tomorrow I have a meeting with Pilpel to speak about mutations, redundancy and so on. By the moment I would like to know what he -and his team- is doing to uncover induction of mutations. In fact Pilpel is essentially involved in the study of redundancy and in one of the last papers by his team it was established that redundancy associated to duplicated genes is not always evolutionary unstable. Redundancy supported by duplicated genes connected to overlapping genes which are associated to protein hubs -i.e. vulnerable proteins which bind to an important number of proteins- is not lost with evolution, which implies that a mechanism avoiding mutations to erase the hub is working and that redundancy is one of the involved devices. An interesting questions comes here: is there a directed mechanism blocking redundancy to get augmentation of the rates of mutations? This question is related with what I am reading in the Jablonka book. Today I will read again the papers and I will make a summary that I will include here tomorrow. The Santa Fe Institute I must not forget to write tomorrow to the people working at the Santa Fe Institute.