Evolutionary Perspectives on Protein Thermodynamics

While modern evolutionary theory has emphasized the role of neutral evolution, protein biochemistry and biophysics has interpreted the properties of proteins as largely resulting from adaptive evolution. We demonstrate that a number of these properties can be seen as emerging from neutral evolution acting on sequence entropy, that is, the fact that larger numbers of viable sequences have these properties. In this paper, we use a computational model of populations of evolving lattice proteins to describe how the observed marginal stability of proteins as well as their robustness to mutations can result from neutral evolution.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICCS
• Authors: Richard A. Goldstein
• Keywords: ICCS 2004, Modern Evolutionary Theory, Neutral Evolution, Proteins