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In biology, homology is similarity in anatomical structures or genes between organisms of different taxa due to shared ancestry, regardless of current functional differences. Evolutionary biology explains homologous structures as retained heredity from a common ancestor after having been subjected to adaptive modifications for different ...
Sequence homology is the biological homology between DNA, RNA, or protein sequences, defined in terms of shared ancestry in the evolutionary history of life. Two segments of DNA can have shared ancestry because of three phenomena: either a speciation event (orthologs), or a duplication event (paralogs), or else a horizontal (or lateral) gene ...
Whereas ordinary homology is seen in the pattern of structures such as limb bones of mammals that are evidently related, deep homology can apply to groups of animals that have quite dissimilar anatomy: vertebrates (with endoskeletons made of bone and cartilage) and arthropods (with exoskeletons made of chitin) nevertheless have limbs that are constructed using similar recipes or "algorithms".
Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. One proposed definition of constraint is "A property of a trait that, although possibly adaptive in the environment in which it originally evolved, acts to place limits on the production of new phenotypic variants."
A protein superfamily is the largest grouping of proteins for which common ancestry can be inferred (see homology).Usually this common ancestry is inferred from structural alignment [1] and mechanistic similarity, even if no sequence similarity is evident. [2]
Homology search tools may take an individual nucleic acid or protein sequence as input, or use statistical models generated from multiple sequence alignments of known related sequences. Statistical models such as profile-HMMs , and RNA covariance models which also incorporate structural information, [ 27 ] can be helpful when searching for more ...
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Comparative anatomy is the study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of different species. It is closely related to evolutionary biology and phylogeny [ 1 ] (the evolution of species). The science began in the classical era , continuing in the early modern period with work by Pierre Belon who noted the similarities of the skeletons ...