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:
“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)
“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)
“As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)