Cardiovascular biology

The mechanism of species evolution is one of the major goals of evolutionary biology and it was considered as a consequence of combination of various factors. Gene duplication and evolutionary changes of protein-coding sequences are considered as important contributors to the species evolution. Highly conserved gene families that are ubiquitous in living organisms can be used as a powerful tool to study the evolution of living organisms. Because DNA repair pathways are crucial for maintaining genome stability, the pathways together with the key genes involved are usually conserved between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The evolutionary history of recombination repair genes recA/RAD51 family and mismatch repair genes MutS and MutL families were systematically examined in this study. Based on my results, I found that the origins of eukaryotic DNA repair genes are divergent. The eukaryotic RAD51-like genes were derived from the ancestral archaeal species. In contrast, the eukaryotic MutS and MutL genes likely originated from proteobacteria by endosymbiosis of mitochondria, indicating different origins of eukaryotic informational genes