MBE Advance Access published online on February 24, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msj114
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1 Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA; Department of Biology, MSC03 2020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Gene duplication is thought to play the singular most important role in the formation of novel genes. The canonical model of gene duplication postulates that novel genes arise in a two-step fashion, namely (i) the complete duplication of a gene followed by (ii) the gradual accumulation of mutations in one or both copies leading to an altered function. It was previously demonstrated that more than 50% of newborn duplicates in Caenorhabditis elegans had unique exon(s) in one or both members of a duplicate pair, indicating that many duplicates are not functionally identical to the progenitor copy at birth. Here we report the frequencies of partial and chimeric duplications leading to the formation of novel genes in C. elegans. Partial gene duplications, often in conjunction with recruitment of neighborhood sequence exceed chimeric duplications. For chimeric duplications, the genomic sources of unique exon(s) are diverse, including genic and intergenic regions, as well as repetitive elements. These novel genes derived from partial and chimeric duplications are equally likely to be transcriptionally active as copies derived from complete duplications of the ancestral gene. Duplication breakpoints in the ancestral copies are uniformly distributed in the genome, ruling out the role of any mechanism that restricts them to a particular type of sequence such as introns. Finally, both intron loss and gain contribute to the differential distribution of introns between two copies.
Accepted February 20, 2006
Research Article
On the Formation of Novel Genes by Duplication in the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome
Vaishali Katju 1 *
and
Michael Lynch 2
2 Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Vaishali Katju, E-mail: vkatju{at}unm.edu
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