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Date: January 24, 2012 7:16:42 PM EST To: Bart Hazes <bha...@ualberta.ca<mailto:bha...@ualberta.ca>> Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] quasispecies This remark brings to mind a paper published recently by Ariel Fernandez and Mike Lynch: Nature 474:502, 2011: Non-adaptive Origins of Interactome Complexity The point, if I understand it correctly, is that when population sizes are small, as they are in multicellular eukaryotes, the effect of "drift" becomes more significant, and mutations to the surfaces of proteins that impair the protein surface - solvent interaction are established more easily in the population. A consequence suggested by the authors is that these "surface defects" provide an enhanced manifold from which to recruit novel surface-surface contacts that lead to an increase in the interactome". Charlie On Jan 24, 2012, at 4:31 PM, Bart Hazes wrote: To some extend I feel that this is always the case but for "normal" organisms the sampling rate of fitness space is slow and genetic differences between individuals are dominated by mutations passed down by vertical descend. In contrast, if you sequence two viruses from the above two infections there genetic distance will be similar to the genetic distances between individuals within a single infection.
