Molecular Evolution of Polypeptide Hormones
At present much of our work is concerned with the molecular evolution of
growth hormone (GH) and prolactin, which shows a number of interesting aspects,
including widely divergent evolutionary rates and gene duplications giving rise to
subfamilies of related proteins. A current project involves studies on GH
evolution in primates, designed to understand more fully the marked
differences between human and non-primate GHs and the origin of the
family of GH-like placental proteins that occurs in higher primates but not in
other mammals. Similar projects are underway or envisaged on GHs of
ruminants and rodents, and on prolactins and related proteins (including
receptors) from various mammalian groups.
The approach taken in these studies is to clone genes for GH and related
proteins from genomic libraries or using PCR techniques, and to characterize
them using sequencing and other molecular techniques. Sequences so
obtained are analysed using a variety of computational methods, and are used
as the basis for molecular homology modelling in order to relate sequence
variation to differences in 3D structure and to evaluate potential for receptor
binding.
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Last update 1st August 2005