The genesis of tyrosine phosphorylation.
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Tyrosine phosphorylation of proteins was discovered in 1979, but this posttranslational modification had been "invented" by evolution more than a billion years ago in single-celled eukaryotic organisms that were the antecedents of the first multicellular animals. Because sophisticated cell-cell communication is a sine qua non for the existence of m...