Brachiators On Our family Tree? (Common ancestry - direct evidence?)

From: Peter Ruest (pruest@pop.mysunrise.ch)
Date: Fri Mar 29 2002 - 12:59:16 EST

  • Next message: Peter Ruest: "Brachiators On Our family Tree? (Common ancestry - directevidence?)"

    Hi Preston,
    you wrote:

    > A particularly relevant paper is the following:

    > Johnson, W.E. and Coffin, J.M. Constructing primate phylogenies from
    ancient retrovirus sequences. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 96:
    10254-10260 1999

    > By chance (if anything really is), I just noticed another paper you
    will find interesting, although not for the same reason. It is from
    the new papers added at PNAS this week.

    > Zhang, J. and H. F. Rosenberg (2002). "Complementary advantageous
    substitutions in the evolution of an antiviral RNase of higher
    primates." PNAS: 072626199. <

    Thank you very much for these indications!

    I have studied the Johnson & Coffin paper. It looks really relevant to
    my question. I have just a minor reservation lingering. Only two of the
    six proviruses they studied behaved exactly as expected, while in
    several cases they had to invoke gene conversions (or lack of true
    homology) to explain their deviant gene trees. They were surprised by
    the high frequency of such conversion, saying this "probably reflects
    the likelihood of conversion among any repeated, nuclear DNA sequences".
    They also emphasized the "evidence for high frequency of recombination
    involving ERV sequences". What are the implications of this? Doesn't
    this weaken the evidence for non-selected sequence similarities between
    human and chimp?

    There is a more recent paper from the same lab: Hughes J.F., Coffin J.M.
    Evidence for genomic rearrangements mediated by human endogenous
    retroviruses during primate evolution. Nature Genetics 29 (2001),
    487-489. Again, they find that recombination events involving HERVs "may
    have been extremely frequent during the course of primate evolution".
    Curiously, in all 23 new cases they investigated, they never found both
    of the predicted reciprocal products of recombination. What's the
    implication for the evidence of common ancestry between human and chimp?

    I have not yet been able to look at the Zhang & Rosenberg paper, as the
    full text is not available online to non-subscribers, and the library I
    frequent had not yet received any 2002 issue of PNAS by March 20! I'll
    get to it later I hope.

    Peter 

    -- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)

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