Evolution.

Multiple sequence alignments:

File:NonredundantMSA.pdf

An alignment of a blast search of the NCBI's nonredundant database. Some of the sequences are protein or translated cDNA, but many come from genome annotations, with no functional information. For some organisms, a few variants of the sequence are included. The sources are both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. (~180 sequences)

TopNonredundantMSA.pdf

An alignment of a selection of the sequences from above.

These two MSAs show that the sequence has been well conserved - some of the residues almost 100% conserved over a wide variety of organisms. However, if you use these to make other inferences, keep in mind that some of these sequences may not code for ssu72 (or anything else)...

File:SwissProtMSA.pdf

An alignment from a blast search of SwissProt. The data is higher quality and less redundant, and there is functional information for each sequence. Of the 24 sequences, 3 are human ssu72 homologues, and the others are ssu72 from various eukaryotes. This MSA shows the conserved regions for ssu72. Since these are ssu72 sequences, I think the residues that show up as conserved here are probably important for structure/function.

Relation to other organisms

File:SwissProtTax.txt

The taxonomy of the hits from SwissProt. Note these are all eukaryotes.

A dot matrix alignment between Drosophila (x-axis) and Human (y-axis) ssu72. The proteins are virtually identical.