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Dr ENGEL replies: Williams and Wilkins have done the evidence less than justice in two respects: (1) Our disagreement hinges upon the choice of a basis for statistical assessment of the observed sequence match. Absolute validity can neither be attained nor defined; one can only attempt to select reasonable criteria. My original probability calculation may have been too arbitrarily exclusive but, equally, Williams's and Wilkins's computer-search is too arbitrarily all-inclusive. To ignore relevant information must bias the calculation against discovery of the truth. The evidence for the importance of lysine-126 comes not only from studies of kinetics and binding (see ref. 1), but also from sequence comparisons which show that lysine-126 is in a conserved region2–4. This being so, even fifty may be an overestimate of the necessary number of sequences containing lysine-126 to be compared.
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ENGEL, P. On the Evidence for Partial Gene Duplication from Amino Acid Sequence of Bovine Glutamate Dehydrogenase (reply). Nature 247, 557 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1038/247557a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/247557a0
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