The Evolution of Enamelin Genes

There are many genes that are involved in the formation of teeth. One of the most important genes is the Enam gene. The Enam gene is essential for tooth development. It codes for the Enamelin protein that is responsible for developing the outer layer of the tooth known as enamel. Here we study and compare the sequences of the Enam gene in different mammalian and non mammalian species. The NCBI database was used to data mine the Enam gene sequences. We used the alignments of the different animals to perform a comparative analysis. The ENAM alignment allowed us to identify differences in the gene structure among the different species. Our results, identified both highly conserved regions and highly divergent regions. The highly conserved regions suggest functionally important regions while the highly divergent regions suggest less functional importance.