Talk:Conserved sequence

Move to Wiktionary?
I would suggest no move, because IMO this entry is likely to be a valuable object for collecting links to from other articles.

With time, "what links here" may become increasingly interesting. At the same time, the article could be usefully expanded, by addressing eg the questions "what kind of sequences tend to be strongly conserved?" and "just how conserved are they?". -- Jheald 09:40, 12 February 2006 (UTC).

Merged talk page of Conservation (genetics)
(The talk page of the merged article consists solely of wikiproject headers and one comment, so I'm merging the comment below):

what
what should we do with conservation should we keep it or get rid of it?

Comment: I think that conservation is absolutely an important concept and should be kept. I use Wikipedia as a source for nursing science, which increasingly addresses genetic topics, and I'm happy to see more and more issues of cell biology appearing here. I know that the degree of conservation in a sequence is an important indicator of the significance it's had--I imagine that as more information about specific proteins comes onto wikipedia, an article on genetic conservation would be a useful "hub." The articles on conservation (genetics) and conserved sequences probably ought to be merged, because the materials on these pages seem to compliment each other. My favorite title for it would be "genetic conservation."--Paul bryner 07:20, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Woolly thinking on "non-coding"?
Currently we have this text: "Highly conserved DNA sequences are thought to have functional value. The role for many of these highly conserved non-coding DNA sequences is not understood. One recent study that eliminated four highly-conserved non-coding DNA sequences in mice yielded viable mice with no significant phenotypic differences; the authors described their findings as "unexpected".

My problem with this is that (a) it's not made clear whether "highly conserved DNA sequences" are more or less likely to be non-coding, and (b) there is no link to the concept of the functions of non-coding DNA.

Snori (talk) 04:41, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Merge of Conservation (genetics) into Conserved sequence
I think Conservation (genetics) and Conserved sequence should be merged into a single article since genetic conservaton is in fact conservation of DNA or RNA sequences (or protein sequences coded by DNA/RNA sequences). My inclination is to have the name of the merged article be Conserved sequence (with Conservation (genetics) turning into a redirect to it). The term conserved sequence is encountered more often, although genetic conservation (or conservation (genetics)) might be seen as more formal or something. Other opinions about such a merge? -R. S. Shaw 20:12, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

I would agree with that, they really are the same article. However, I'd say the main article ought to be conservation (genetics) because what the article really discusses is the concept of genetic conservation, rather than specific conserved sequences or the definition of the term. -Bobsagat 11:41, 7 November 2007 (EST)

When I write articles, I'm more likely to talk about "conserved sequences" or "sequence conservation". The more I think about it, the more I think it's a question of scope. "Conservation" (genetics) could refer to not only sequence conservation, but also conservation of function, conservation of regulatory pathways, etc. It closely overlaps with topics like Negative selection and Stabilizing selection. The fact that the the top of Conservation (genetics) says "This article is not about conservation genetics" also suggests that the article title could be misinterpreted. I guess there could be room for both Conserved sequence and Conservation (genetics), but I'd rather see Conserved sequence kept if only one stays. Forluvoft 20:32, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I concur with the three previous editor's comments. The two articles should be merged. I do not have a strong opinion on the name of the new article. N2e (talk) 12:46, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm in the process of merging the two articles. Conservation (genetics) will be kept as a disambiguation page. --Formerly the IP-Address 24.22.227.53 (talk) 13:54, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Rename to Conservation (genetics)
I read the discussion above and I think the wrong decision was made regarding the name of the merged article, and I'd like to re-open this issue. IMO, "Conservation (genetics)" is a better choice. Quoting Forluvoft:

"The more I think about it, the more I think it's a question of scope. "Conservation" (genetics) could refer to not only sequence conservation, but also conservation of function, conservation of regulatory pathways, etc."

This issue is more important than any reason given for naming the article "Conserved sequence". For a case in point, I'd like to link to this from a bit of an article talking about about conservation of a specific mechanism (DNA replication), but I can't, because as it stands, the article scope is too specific.

Klortho (talk) 15:12, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

First image
The first image on this page is unclear. It is not a standard representation of protein sequences and I think would cause confusion for the majority of readers. At the very least, it'd be good to find a new lead image, and maybe remove the current lead image all together. Any other opinions? T. Shafee (Evo&#38;Evo) (talk) 04:29, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree. A sequence alignment and/or a logos plot would be a more obvious representation of this concept.--Paul (talk) 09:56, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Image Change Effects
A lot of text under "Conserved protein sequences and structures" no longer makes sense, referencing the old image and has not yet been updated for the new one. Student 19/05/2015
 * Thanks for noticing that. I've gone though and fixed the problem by making the paragraph more general and movign it to a Notation subsection. T.Shafee(Evo&#65120;Evo)talk 00:05, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Updates
Hello! I'm editing this page for the ISCB student editing competition. I'm planning a few updates for improving the page quality over December:

- Add history section [started] - Mechanisms and implications of sequence conservation - Measuring conservation - Discuss sequence alignment and its applications (homology search and genome alignments) for identifying conserved sequences - Outline metrics for conserved sequences - Applications - Marker genes and 16S for phylogenetics - Studying last universal common ancestor - Various uses for studying conservation at different taxonomic levels (i.e popgen, GWAS, pan-genomes in rapidly evolving bacteria) - Identifying functional sequences or regions

I also plan to include more examples from other domains/kingdoms.Biobeth (talk) 09:06, 7 December 2017 (UTC)