Question

The presence of evolutionary traces is because some of the residues that perform key functional and structural roles tend to be preserved by natural selection; other residues that may be less crucial for structure and function tend to mutate more frequently.

(a) True

(b) False

The question was asked by my college professor while I was bunking the class.

This intriguing question comes from Sequence Homology Versus Sequence Similarity and Identity in portion Pairwise Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right choice is (a) True

Explanation: The residues that perform key functional and structural roles tend to be preserved by natural selection. For example, active site residues of an enzyme family tend to be conserved because they are responsible for catalytic functions. Therefore, by comparing sequences through alignment, patterns of conservation and variation can be identified.