One feature shared among living systems is their ability to cope with perturbations and remain stable, a property that is the result of evolutionary fine-tuning over many generations.
These results support the hypothesis that evolutionary fine-tuning of the cone system in birds extends to the level of spatial patterning.
The apparent correlation between gene expression and growth rate, observed under steady state conditions, is likely to reflect the evolutionary fine-tuning of these signals with the expected growth rate, rather than direct growth-dependent signals.
Taken together, our results suggest that the apparent coupling of translation-related gene expression and growth rate is not causal, but reflects the evolutionary fine-tuning of signal transduction mechanisms.
Gene conversion has a central role in the evolutionary fine-tuning of regulatory elements in the fruit fly Drosophila miranda.
Consequently, the rate of evolutionary fine-tuning at such regulatory elements can be greatly accelerated by increasing their effective population size (Mano and Innan, 2008).
The first two scenarios both seem parsimonious, as they can explain the symmetrical GC skew plot of pSCL4 without the need for extensive subsequent evolutionary fine-tuning.
It is interesting to consider whether this incomplete optimization of the conformational search is a consequence of evolutionary fine-tuning driven by the requirements of homeostasis.
These pathological attractors are developmentally not accessible owing to evolutionary fine-tuning of the landscape topography such that it buffers developmental trajectories and canalises them to the normal attractors (Waddington, 1956).
These results describe a novel route by which fully functional regulatory elements can arise rapidly from TEs and implicate non-allelic gene conversion as having an important role in accelerating the evolutionary fine-tuning of regulatory networks.
The reverse question can also be asked: whether the more severe pathology of HIV-1 is attributable to the absence of Vpx and to evolutionary fine-tuning of CA-cofactor interactions that avoid innate immune detection.
