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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Sep 14.
Published in final edited form as: Genome Dyn Stab. 2008 Jan 1;2:81–123. doi: 10.1007/7050_2007_026

Figure 5. Rapid divergence of DSB proteins.

Figure 5

The sequence conservation (% amino acid identity) between S. cerevisiae and each of several other Saccharomyces species is shown for the indicated proteins. DSB proteins diverge rapidly, especially when compared with two examples of mitotically expressed proteins, Rad51 and Arg4. Remarkably, Rec104 and Rec114 are less than 80% conserved even in S. paradoxus, a very close sibling of S. cerevisiae. A Rec104 homolog was not detected in the S. castellii genome sequence. Note that this analysis is not meant to imply that DSB proteins are uniquely prone to rapid divergence, although it has been demonstrated that meiotic recombination proteins in general tend to be among the cell's most divergent (Richard et al. 2005). Rather, the point is that they do diverge rapidly and may thus be difficult to identify by routine sequence homology searches in evolutionarily more distant organisms.