In particular, the location of high-centrality fragments could indicate the regions undergoing functionally relevant conformational changes and the statistical analysis of the shortest paths could identify potential allosteric sites.
Our findings reveal that mammalian duplicate genes are initially functionally conserved, and then undergo rapid functional divergence over evolutionary time, acquiring diverse tissue-specific biological roles.
It is still unknown how cancer cells functionally undergo cytoskeletal rearrangement to exhibit mesenchymal features, interact with extracellular matrix, and migrate to distant locations when the EMT process is initiated.
Stimpson et al. (2010) recently showed that the human dicentrics, being functionally monocentric, undergo centromere inactivation through different processes: (1) by epigenetic mechanisms or (2) by size reduction of the alpha-satDNA array associated with CENP-A.
Thus, we determined the expression levels of several apoptosis-relevant proteins in a total of five pancreatic tumour cell lines showing different potential to undergo apoptosis, and we functionally analysed these data in the context of sensitivity to anti-CD95- or TRAIL-induced cell death.
The assumption is that genes with functionally related proteins would undergo similar rates of evolution; yet it is possible for functionally unrelated genes to have undergone rate similarities.
This result is consistent with Brenner's hypothesis that hyperfiltration that anatomically or functionally single kidneys undergo (i.e. in patients with unilateral renal agenesis, transplantation, or severe impairment of one kidney) causes damage with subsequent sclerotic changes [74].
Neuroplasticity refers to the inherently dynamic biological capacity of the central nervous system (CNS) to undergo maturation, change structurally and functionally in response to experience and to adapt following injury.
Our findings show that a noticeable fraction of functionally important sites undergo coevolution and also point towards compensatory substitutions as a probable coevolutionary mechanism within spatially proximal coevolved functional sites.
However, under certain conditions, those GEIs that are functionally mobile can undergo excision, self-transfer and reintegration into a new host.
