Comment by dekhn
2 years ago
No organisms have virtually 0 sequence identity. That's nonsense. Can you give an example? n Even some random million-year-isolated archae shares the majority of its genes with common bacteria.
2 years ago
No organisms have virtually 0 sequence identity. That's nonsense. Can you give an example? n Even some random million-year-isolated archae shares the majority of its genes with common bacteria.
Organisms, yes. Individual genes within an organism may have no sequence identity to genes in other organisms (outside of what you would expect at random). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_gene
Yes, that's what I thought. I worked with m. genitalium and we were always looking for proteins that had no homology or no existing structure (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20...)
MKVLMKKESLPIVKPFDEVIIEVLQAPKEVEREVALKDGTIKKIQDYSIIVKPVSGKFESVTEKVTSKTEDGDEVVKPKKYDASELKDKVVMKLTQKAFEVLYDAWQNKEIGEGTKLKIKVTKKQNKTYFDEITVLDEKEEEETEEEAKVKPKPKLKG
That's a single protein not an organism.
They obviously mean organisms that have notable numbers of proteins with virtually no sequence identity. The difference is only germane to the conversation if you're looking for something to nitpick. The only point of bringing it up was that they encounter non-trivial numbers of really weird proteins.