Evolution states that all life descended, with innumerable divergent modifications, from common ancestors.
Retinal ganglion cells, like output neurons in many neural circuits, exhibit strong noise correlations (Arnett and Spraker, 1981; Mastronarde, 1983; Murphy and Rieke, 2008; Cafaro and Rieke, 2010; Volgyi et al., 2013), and these correlations can be dominated by divergent noise from common upstream circuit elements (Brivanlou et al., 1998; Trong and Rieke, 2008; Ala-Laurila et al., 2011).
The closest living relatives of the elephants were sea cows and hyraxes, but the three groups were highly divergent from their common ancestor.
The two remaining haplotypes (RAL-639 and RAL-335) were highly divergent from this common haplotype group, contributing nearly half of the segregating sites to the population sample.
While most sampled populations had little or no genetic variation across half the planet, a small number of specimens from widely spaced locales were highly divergent from the most common haplotypes, yet relatively similar to each other.
We attribute this to a higher level of degeneracy within this higher-order repeat family in vivo, with the cloned fragment being divergent from the most common sequence predicted by the genome survey.
This study compared the intraclonal genome diversity of P. aeruginosa isolates derived from common and divergent sources.
Recent studies also demonstrate that domains descended from common ancestors through divergent evolution appear more widely across the kingdoms of life than had previously been recognized.
Therefore, we would like to suggest that – as in the case of the nematode hh-related genes – the Cnidarian N-terminal domains have evolved from common ancestors by divergent evolution rather than by domain acquisition.
The earliest divergent lineage in which we found ESTs from the PLT subfamily is the fern lineage (Ceratopteris richardii), which diverged from its common ancestor with the seed plants approximately 400 million years ago.
