TY - JOUR
T1 - The Structure and Early Evolution of Recently Arisen Gene Duplicates in the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome
AU - Katju, Vaishah
AU - Lynch, Michael
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2003/12
Y1 - 2003/12
N2 - The significance of gene duplication in provisioning raw materials for the evolution of genomic diversity is widely recognized, but the early evolutionary dynamics of duplicate genes remain obscure. To elucidate the structural characteristics of newly arisen gene duplicates at infancy and their subsequent evolutionary properties, we analyzed gene pairs with ≤10% divergence at synonymous sites within the genome of Caenorhabditis elegans. Structural heterogeneity between duplicate copies is present very early in their evolutionary history and is maintained over longer evolutionary timescales, suggesting that duplications across gene boundaries in conjunction with shuffling events have at least as much potential to contribute to long-term evolution as do fully redundant (complete) duplicates. The median duplication span of 1.4 kb falls short of the average gene length in C. elegans (2.5 kb), suggesting that partial gene duplications are frequent. Most gene duplicates reside close to the parent copy at inception, often as tandem inverted loci, and appear to disperse in the genome as they age, as a result of reduced survivorship of duplicates located in proximity, to the ancestral copy. We propose that illegitimate recombination events leading to inverted duplications play a disproportionately large role in gene duplication within this genome in comparison with other mechanisms.
AB - The significance of gene duplication in provisioning raw materials for the evolution of genomic diversity is widely recognized, but the early evolutionary dynamics of duplicate genes remain obscure. To elucidate the structural characteristics of newly arisen gene duplicates at infancy and their subsequent evolutionary properties, we analyzed gene pairs with ≤10% divergence at synonymous sites within the genome of Caenorhabditis elegans. Structural heterogeneity between duplicate copies is present very early in their evolutionary history and is maintained over longer evolutionary timescales, suggesting that duplications across gene boundaries in conjunction with shuffling events have at least as much potential to contribute to long-term evolution as do fully redundant (complete) duplicates. The median duplication span of 1.4 kb falls short of the average gene length in C. elegans (2.5 kb), suggesting that partial gene duplications are frequent. Most gene duplicates reside close to the parent copy at inception, often as tandem inverted loci, and appear to disperse in the genome as they age, as a result of reduced survivorship of duplicates located in proximity, to the ancestral copy. We propose that illegitimate recombination events leading to inverted duplications play a disproportionately large role in gene duplication within this genome in comparison with other mechanisms.
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M3 - Article
C2 - 14704166
AN - SCOPUS:0346100700
VL - 165
SP - 1793
EP - 1803
JO - Genetics
JF - Genetics
SN - 0016-6731
IS - 4
ER -