Our planet is a large laboratory in which an innumerable amount of
biological experiments have taken place over billions of years. The
principal factors underpinning these experiments are mutations in
the DNA, natural selection, and stochastic events. Accordingly, we
can regard current biological and molecular diversity as a product
of many lines of successful experiments. The genomes that make up
the blueprints of all the surviving species are littered with information
that may be used to trace the faint lines of the successful experiments.
The genomes contain information about genes that may be of great
interest to science and of relevance to the bio-prospecting, agricultural,
pharmaceutical, and biotechnological industries. Knowledge of the
evolutionary history of such genes can be used to trace the changes
in structure and function of ancient gene products (e.g.,Nature
374, 57-59 [1995]; Mol. Biol. Evol. 19, 1483-1489
[2002]) with highly sought after properties.
To extract the relevant information about important genes by means
of phylogenetic analysis is a cost-effective strategy that will
allow us to obtain a clearer picture of the evolution of these genes,
and of the organic molecules that are important in design and function
of all these organisms.
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