Skip Navigation



MBE Advance Access published online on December 18, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl199
This Article
Right arrow Advance Access manuscript (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
24/3/679    most recent
msl199v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Cusack, B. P.
Right arrow Articles by Wolfe, K. H.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Cusack, B. P.
Right arrow Articles by Wolfe, K. H.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2006. 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

Research Article

Not Born Equal: Increased Rate Asymmetry in Relocated and Retrotransposed Rodent Gene Duplicates

Brian P. Cusack and Kenneth H. Wolfe

Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

Correspondence should be addressed to: Prof. Kenneth H. Wolfe, Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. email khwolfe{at}tcd.ie, Tel. +353 1 8961253

Accepted for publication December 5, 2006.

Duplicated genes frequently evolve at different rates. This asymmetry is evidence of natural selection's ability to discriminate between the two copies, subjecting them to different levels of purifying selection, or even permitting adaptive evolution of one or both copies. However, if gene duplication creates pairs of protein coding sequences that are initially identical, this raises the question of how selection tells the two copies apart. Here we investigated asymmetric sequence divergence of recently duplicated genes in rodents and related this to two possible sources of such asymmetry: gene relocation as a consequence of duplication, and retrotransposition as a mechanism of gene duplication. We found that most young rodent duplicates that have been relocated were created by retrotransposition. The degree of rate asymmetry in gene pairs where one copy has been relocated (either by retrotransposition or DNA-based duplication) is greater than in pairs formed by local DNA-based duplication events. Furthermore, by considering the direction of transposition for distant duplicates, we found a consistent tendency for retrogenes to undergo accelerated protein evolution relative to their static paralogs, whereas DNA-based transpositions showed no such tendency. Finally, we demonstrate that the faster sequence evolution of retrogenes correlates with the profound alteration of their expression pattern that is precipitated by retrotransposition.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.