2
January 2003
Genes: Strength in numbers
The question of what mechanisms have evolved to minimize the deleterious effects of gene mutations is of central interest in developmental biology and molecular evolution. In many cases, deletion of a gene will have little effect on the phenotype of an organism. Is this 'robustness' most often due to the presence of a 'spare' gene or genes to fill the breach, or are alternative networks and metabolic pathways utilized? The availability of data on the fitness effect of a deletion of almost every gene in the yeast genome — and the knowledge of which genes have homologues elsewhere on the genome — has made a whole-genome evaluation of this question possible. The results indicate that duplicate genes have maintained functional compensation for each other, despite millions of years of separate evolution after duplication.
Role
of duplicate genes in genetic robustness against null mutations
ZHENGLONG
GU, LARS M. STEINMETZ, XUN GU, CURT SCHARFE, RONALD W. DAVIS & WEN-HSIUNG
LI
Nature 421, 63–66 (2003); doi:10.1038/nature01198
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Molecular evolution: Duplication, duplication
AXEL MEYER
Duplicated genes are common in genomes, perhaps
because they provide redundancy: if one copy is inactivated, the other can still
work. A new study quantifies the effects of deleting 'singletons' and duplicated
genes in yeast.
Nature 421, 31–32 (2003); doi:10.1038/421031a
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