A structural perspective on genome evolution.

Protein translations of over 100 complete genomes are now available. About half of these sequences can be provided with structural annotation, thereby enabling some profound insights into protein and pathway evolution. Whereas the major domain structure families are common to all kingdoms of life, these are combined in different ways in multidomain proteins to give various domain architectures that are specific to kingdoms or individual genomes, and contribute to the diverse phenotypes observed. These data argue for more targets in structural genomics initiatives and particularly for the selection of different domain architectures to gain better insights into protein functions.