In another project, Stylianos Antonarakis and Emmanouil Dermitzakis of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, uncovered other long stretches of DNA outside genes that, because they are conserved through evolution, are likely to be important, perhaps as regulators of genes.
We chose these two HIV-1 Env regions to compare with gp41 MPER because they are conserved, conformationally accessible, and known to be immunogenic i.e. capable of eliciting robust epitope-specific Ab responses [49], [50].
Several features may contribute to metal specificity in CDF members, nevertheless the widely conserved aspartate residues in TMDs II and V cannot alone be responsible for metal specificity, because they are conserved in transporters with different metal specificities.
Microsatellite loci are particularly useful in initial attempts at comparative mapping in species with few genomic resources, because they are conserved between related species and are highly polymorphic (multiallelic).
We elected to focus on the aromatic residues found at the boundary of the control cable because they are conserved in many SHKs, which suggests that results generated here may be directly applicable to other membrane-spanning receptors.
Rather, they are conserved because a mutation in such a buried residue would tend to perturb the architecture.
This argues against the hypothesis that they are conserved only because of their utility for defence against limited phages or other parasites and favours the hypothesis that they behave as selfish (host-killing) mobile elements.
From the "no good deed goes unpunished" file: Mineola residents and businesses have been told that their water bills will go up for the next three years because they have been conserving water too well.
Modeling transposon-derived genomic content is difficult because they are poorly conserved.
These three proteins were selected as an interesting case study because they are highly conserved, essential, and of unknown function.
