The recent discovery of hundreds of new human microRNAs that are not conserved beyond primates strongly suggests that "evolution of miRNAs is an ongoing process and that along with ancient, highly conserved miRNAs, there are a number of emerging miRNAs" [ 36].
A major conclusion from comparative genomics is that many sequences that do not code for proteins are conserved beyond neutral expectations, indicating that they evolve under the influence of purifying selection and are likely to have functional roles.
Given a multiple alignment of orthologous mRNA sequences, our goal is to identify alignment columns that are conserved beyond what would be expected by chance if the corresponding sites were evolving only under the selective pressure on the amino acid they contribute to encode.
We computationally identify intergenic sequences conserved beyond neutral expectations, using a conservation algorithm that accounts for the strong compositional biases in malaria genomes.
To explore the possibility that MC-TYR is conserved beyond the seed cluster shown in Figure 3, we carried out sensitive profile-based searches using PSI-BLAST.
Conservation analysis showed that a significant number of ncRNAs is conserved beyond closely related species.
Motivation: We noted that the sumoylation site in C/EBP homologues is conserved beyond the canonical consensus sequence for sumoylation.
The distribution of novel extensions is not substantially different from the global distribution, suggesting that many of these extensions are not phylogenetically conserved beyond melanogaster.
The authors have reported that 81% of the human lncRNAs are not conserved beyond primates and can thus be considered "young".
For example, many miRNAs that were recently discovered in human and chimpanzee were not conserved beyond mammals, and ∼10% were taxon-specific [39].
