Some molecular evidence for human evolution

I’d suggest it as DIY for both you and the students.

You can locate the head/tail boundary easily by aligning the protein sequences two myosins of different classes, like a muscle (II) and a V (my speciality). It’s the N-terminal ~900 residues for most. Some have N-terminal doodads that will change that.

Using head domains goes very deep and has been used as a tool:

Richards, T. A. & Cavalier-Smith, T. Myosin domain evolution and the primary divergence of eukaryotes. Nature 436(7054):1113-8

Then, if you want to go into the tails of a particular group, I’d suggest my beloved myosin-V family. It has 3 members in vertebrate genomes.

If you need some help, maybe we should go through the alignments in public on a new thread and others can play along…

3 Likes