To isolate the origins of the remarkable stabilization, we have designed and characterized a new series of procarboxypeptidase mutants that gain significant thermodynamic stability with a minimal number of mutations; one mutant gains more than 5 kcal/mol of stability over the wild-type protein with only four amino acid changes.
The high frequency of gene fusions is surprising given the relatively few reports of this kind of mutational event in experimental evolution studies, with the notable exception of promoter capture that was central to the evolution of an Escherichia coli mutant that gained the ability to grow on citrate (Blount et al., 2012).
It was through analysis of the most severe ciliogenesis mouse mutants that we gained initial insight into the molecular roles of cilia.
Most basically, if a large fraction of the host population is immune, a large advantage can be gained by parasite mutants that can overcome the host immunity but also retain the ability to infect susceptible hosts (S).
STAT92E functions as an inducer of lamellocyte development, as gain-of-function hopTum-l mutants that activate the JAK/STAT pathway cause lamellocyte over-production.
All mutants that had at least 75% of the parental gain were scored as functional, all other mutants were scored as nonfunctional.
To gain additional insight into oxidative signaling responses, Arabidopsis mutants that exhibited tolerance to oxidative stress were isolated.
To gain better insight into the cytokinin insensitivity of rpn12a-1 seedlings, we screened for suppressor mutants that have a wild-type cytokinin growth response.
Tumor escape, the last phase of the cancer immunoediting model, is characterized by the emergence of somatic mutants that have acquired sufficient gain/loss of function defects, which allows these cancer cells to resist eradication by the immune system [ 9].
This allows us to screen a plasmid library of DsbG* mutants for those that have gained the ability to fold PhoA* (39 41) (Fig. 1).
