*4.7. Variability and Conservation of Linker Regions*

The DLD-type processive enzymes studied here contain two globular domains connected by a disordered linker. To analyze their evolutionary relatedness, we applied the MAFFT (Multiple Alignment using Fast Fourier Transform) program to generate multiple alignments [64] of the sequences from several species, anchored by the flanking ordered binding domain(s), which are highly conserved. Evolutionary conservation of a given region (either disordered or folded) was calculated by an algorithm that computes the average of genetic distances between each pair of sequences in the alignment. The details of the applied method are given in [65]. The species used for alignments and conservation analysis are listed for each protein in Table S2.
