FUNCTIONAL PHYLOGENY - THE USE OF THE SENSITIVITY OF RIBOSOMES TO PROTEIN-SYNTHESIS INHIBITORS AS A TOOL TO STUDY THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANISMS

In order to study the functional phylogeny of organisms, forty differe nt protein synthesis inhibitors with diverse domain and funcional spec ificities have been used to analyze forty archaeal, bacterial and euka ryotic translational systems. The inhibition curves generated with the different ribosome-antibiotic pairs have shown very interesting simil arities among organisms belonging to the same phylogenetic group, conf irming the feasibility of using such information in the development of evolutionary studies. A new method to extract most of the information contained in the inhibition curves is presented. Using a statistical treatment based on the principal components analysis of the data, we h ave defined coordinates for the organisms which have allowed us to per form a functional clustering of them. The phenograms obtained are very similar to those generated by 16/18S rRNA sequence comparison. These results prove the phylogenetic value of our functional analysis and su ggest an interesting intersection between genotypic and phenotypic (fu nctional) information.