Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 11, 839-853, Copyright © 1994 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
J Nielsen, AA Peixoto, A Piccin, R Costa, CP Kyriacou and D Chalmers
The region of the clock gene period (per) that encodes a repetitive tract
of threonine-glycine (Thr-Gly) pairs has been compared between Dipteran
species both within and outside the Drosophilidae. All the non-
Drosophilidae sequences in this region are short and present a remarkably
stable picture compared to the Drosophilidae, in which the region is much
larger and extremely variable, both in size and composition. The
accelerated evolution in the repetitive region of the Drosophilidae appears
to be mainly due to an expansion of two ancestral repeats, one encoding a
Thr-Gly dipeptide and the other a pentapeptide rich in serine, glycine, and
asparagine or threonine. In some drosophilids the expansion involves a
duplication of the pentapeptide sequence, but in Drosophila pseudoobscura
both the dipeptide and the pentapeptide repeats are present in larger
numbers. In the nondrosophilids, however, the pentapeptide sequence is
represented by one copy and the dipeptide by two copies. These observations
fulfill some of the predictions of recent theoretical models that have
simulated the evolution of repetitive sequences.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Big flies, small repeats: the "Thr-Gly" region of the period gene in Diptera
Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
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