Research Article Genetic Variation and Its Reflection on Posttranslational Modifications in Frequency Clock and Mating Type a-1 Proteins in Sordaria fimicola Rabia Arif, 1 Faiza Akram, 1 Tazeen Jamil, 1 Hamid Mukhtar, 2 Siu Fai Lee, 3 and Muhammad Saleem 1 1 Molecular Genetics Research Laboratory, Department of Botany, University of the Punjab, Lahore 54590, Pakistan 2 Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Government College University, Lahore 54590, Pakistan 3 Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University and CSIRO Black Mountain Laboratories, Building 101, Clunies Ross Street, Black Mountain, ACT 2601, Australia Correspondence should be addressed to Hamid Mukhtar; hamidwaseer@yahoo.com Received 12 December 2016; Revised 24 March 2017; Accepted 5 April 2017; Published 21 June 2017 Academic Editor: Vasiliki Galani Copyright © 2017 Rabia Arif et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Posttranslational modifcations (PTMs) occur in all essential proteins taking command of their functions. Tere are many domains inside proteins where modifcations take place on side-chains of amino acids through various enzymes to generate diferent species of proteins. In this manuscript we have, for the frst time, predicted posttranslational modifcations of frequency clock and mating type a-1 proteins in Sordaria fmicola collected from diferent sites to see the efect of environment on proteins or various amino acids pickings and their ultimate impact on consensus sequences present in mating type proteins using bioinformatics tools. Furthermore, we have also measured and walked through genomic DNA of various Sordaria strains to determine genetic diversity by genotyping the short sequence repeats (SSRs) of wild strains of S. fmicola collected from contrasting environments of two opposing slopes (harsh and xeric south facing slope and mild north facing slope) of Evolution Canyon (EC), Israel. Based on the whole genome sequence of S. macrospora, we targeted 20 genomic regions in S. fmicola which contain short sequence repeats (SSRs). Our data revealed genetic variations in strains from south facing slope and these fndings assist in the hypothesis that genetic variations caused by stressful environments lead to evolution. 1. Introduction Environmental stress is thought to be among the key driving forces of evolution and species adaptation because of its infuential role in inducing genetic variations which ulti- mately help the species to evolve by increasing their evolu- tionary potential [1–3]. Environmental conditions encounter organisms with natural selection by manipulating parental and genetic variants and thus genetic variations become a requirement for evolution as they determine the evolutionary potential of a population [4]. Tese variations in the form of base substitutions/mutations alter the expression of genes and ultimately generate more diverse frontier molecules such as proteins and glycoproteins through various posttranslational modifcations which are fundamentally preferred by the organism facing the environmental stress. Developments in molecular biology have made it easier to explore genetic diversity of species by applying a number of potential tools in the form of molecular markers whereas simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are considered to be one of the strong candi- dates for detecting genetic diversity among species because they are largely interspersed in eukaryotic genomes, can eas- ily be examined by PCR amplifcation with the help of unique fanking primers, and possess high levels of polymorphism [5, 6]. Te SSRs act as codominant non-Mendelian markers that are more frequent and reproducible than dominant markers such as RAPD and are extensively used to determine genetic structure of population and genetic isolation of a population [7]. According to Borˇ stnick and Pumpernik [8], SSR loci with tri- and hexamotifs are relatively abundant in Hindawi BioMed Research International Volume 2017, Article ID 1268623, 10 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/1268623