Evolution
Serpins were initially believed to be restricted to eukaryote organisms, but have since been found in a number of bacteria and archaea. It remains unclear whether these prokaryote genes are the descendants of an ancestral prokaryotic serpin or the product of lateral gene transfer (genetic transfer between organisms not by evolutionary descent). Rawlings et al. showed that serpins are the most widely distributed and largest family of protease inhibitors.
Read more about this topic: Serine Protease Inhibitors
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)