Prediction of gene functions by use of molecular evolutionary approach

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The main purpose of the present research project is to extract functional domains from the nucleotide sequences of homologous gene groups by use of molecular evolutionary approach. To attain this purpose, we first developed the the new method for constructing phylogenetic trees based upon the minimum description length principle. By using this new method, we identified several functional domains of serine protease genes as an example. Because this method was so successful, weextended our approach to all homologous gene groups. Then, we constructed the 'so-called' sequence motif database, where sequence motif represents characteristics of the sequence specific to a particular function. Moreover, we produced nucleotide sequences of genes whose data availability is sos limited by conducting the PCR experiments. In order to establish the sequence techniques in our laboratory, we practiced the PCR experiment by using fish mitochondrial DNAs. These results obtained in this research project is significant for identifying and predicting the gene functions from the nucleotide sepuence data.