Abstract

Cells have evolved intricate systems to sense changes in internal and external conditions. These changes are processed by the cell triggering an appropriate response most commonly via post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins. However, little is known about how these post-translational regulatory networks change during evolution. Recent advances in mass-spectrometry have allowed for the large-scale characterization of post-translational modifications in difference species opening the door for comparative studies.

I will review the progress that has been made in understanding the evolutionary properties of post-translational regulation and to place these advances in the context of the evolution of other cellular interaction types. Novel types of PTMs (e.g. phosphorylation, acetylation, ubiquitylation) arise rarely during evolution but can expand quickly once the available “writer”, “reader” and “eraser” domains are available. Once in place, PTM regulatory interactions can diverge very rapidly with evolutionary properties analogous to transcriptional networks. I will review also the computational methods that have recently been developed to predict the functional relevance of large-scale sets of PTMs and consequences of their evolutionary changes.

The talk is part of the CCBI seminar series and the DTP graduate course Reviews in Computational Biology, but is open to all attendees.