A new computational study has revealed that protein evolution remains significantly constrained by common ancestral origins, limiting the exploration of possible protein sequences. The research compared real protein families with simulated evolutionary processes to understand why natural protein diversity occupies only a narrow region of the vast theoretical sequence space.
The study utilized computational modeling to simulate protein evolution and compared these results with actual protein families found in nature. Researchers found that proteins with shared ancestry tend to remain clustered within specific regions of sequence space, rather than exploring the full range of possible amino acid combinations that could theoretically exist.