BIOINFORMATICS<-->STRUCTURE
Jerusalem, Israel, November 17-21, 1996

Abstract

Evolutionary motif and its biological and structural significance

Y. Tateno (1), K. Ikeo (1), T. Imanishi (1), H. Watanabe (1), T. Endo (1), Y. Yamaguchi (1), Y. Suzuki (1), K. Takahashi (1), K. Tsunoyama (1), M. Kawai (2), Y. Kawanishi (2), K. Naitou (2) and T. Gojobori (1)

(1) Center for Information Biology, National Institute of Genetics, Yata, Mishima 411, Japan
(2) Fujitsu Limited, Makuhari System Laboratory, Mihama-ku, Chiba 261, Japan

ytateno@genes.nig.ac.jp

We developed a method for multiple alignment of protein sequences. The main feature of this method is to take the evolutionary relationships of the proteins in question into account repeatedly for execution, until the relationships and alignment results are in agreement. We then applied this method to the data of the international DNA sequence databases, which are the most comprehensive and updated DNA databases in the world, in order to estimate the "evolutionary motif " by an extensive use of a supercomputer. Though we faced a few problems to be solved, we could estimate the length of the motifs in the range of 20 to 200 amino acids with about 60 as the most frequent length. We then discussed their biological and structural significance. We believe that we are now in a position to analyze DNA and protein not only in vivo and in vitro but also in silico.

Keywords: Evolutionary motif, Motif length, Multiple alignment, Window analysis.

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