All proteins of Saccharomyces cerevisiae
have been compared to determine how frequently segments
from one protein are present in other proteins. Proteins
that are recently evolutionarily related were excluded.
The most frequently present protein segments are long,
tandem repetitions of a single amino acid. For some of
these segments, up to 14% of all proteins in the genome
were found to have similar peptides within them. These
peptide segments may not be functional protein domains.
Although they are the most common shared feature of yeast
proteins, their ubiquity and simplicity argue that their
probable function may be to simply serve as spacers between
other protein motifs.