The research proposed in this application is to develop new and improved old methods for obtaining evolutionary information from the multitude of protein and nucleic acid sequences that result from the revolutionary new techniques in molecular biology. These include the construction of phylogenetic trees, the formulation of ancestral genes and gene products, the detecting and formulating of unequal crossover events, gene conversions and hybridization, the examination of mutagenic events and frequencies during evolution, the study of restrictions imposed upon evolutionary development by structure- function relationships, and the application of the principles derived therefrom to the study of population genetics.
