Evolutionary relationship and secondary structure predictions in four transport proteins ofSaccharomyces cerevisiae

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Abstract
The comparison of the amino acid sequences of four yeast transport proteins indicates that there is a questionable relatedness between the uracil permease (FUR4) and the purine-cytosine permease (FCY2), whereas the arginine permease (CAN1) and the histidine permease (HIP1) clearly originated from a common molecular ancestor. The analysis of the primary structure of these transport proteins by two methods of secondary structure predictions suggests the presence of 9–12 membrane-spanning α-helices in each polypeptide chain. These results are concordant in that 90% of the α-helices were determined by both methods to be at the same positions. In the aligned sequencesHIP1 andCAN1, the postulated membrane-spanning α-helices often start at corresponding sites, even though the overall sequence similarity of the two proteins is only 30%. In the aligned DNA coding sequences ofCAN1 andHIP1, synonymous nucleotide substitutions occur with very similar frequencies in regions where the replacement substitution (changing the amino acids) frequencies are widely different. Moreover, our data suggest that the replacement substitutions can be considered as neutral in the N-terminal segment, whereas the other regions are subject to a conservative selective pressure because, if compared to a random drift, the replacement substitutions are underrepresented.