Comment on “Ancient origins of allosteric activation in a Ser-Thr kinase”

Hadzipasic et al. used ancestral sequence reconstruction to identify historical sequence substitutions that putatively caused Aurora kinases to evolve allosteric regulation. We show that their results arise from an implausible phylogeny and sparse sequence sampling. Addressing either problem reverses their inferences: allostery and the amino acids that confer it were not gained during the diversification of eukaryotes but were lost in a subgroup of Fungi.