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MBE Advance Access originally published online on April 29, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(8):1579-1581; doi:10.1093/molbev/msm082
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Letters

On the Incidence of Intron Loss and Gain in Paralogous Gene Families

Scott William Roy and David Penny

Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

E-mail: scottwroy{at}gmail.com.

Accepted for publication April 10, 2007.

Understanding gene duplication and gene structure evolution are fundamental goals of molecular evolutionary biology. A previous study by Babenko et al. (2004. Prevalence of intron gain over intron loss in the evolution of paralogous gene families. Nucleic Acids Res. 32:3724–3733) employed Dollo parsimony to infer spliceosomal intron losses and gains in paralogous gene families and concluded that there was a general excess of gains over losses. This result contrasts with patterns in orthologous genes, in which most lineages show an excess of intron losses over gains, suggesting the possibility of fundamentally different modes of intron evolution between orthologous and paralogous genes. We further studied the data and found a low level of intron position conservation with outgroups, and this led to problems with using Dollo parsimony to analyze the data. Statistical reanalysis of the data suggests, instead, that intron losses have outnumbered intron gains in paralogous gene families.

Key Words: gene duplication • gene families • genome evolution • parsimony • statistical inference

Kenneth Wolfe, Associate Editor


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