Popovici C, Leveugle M, Birnbaum D, Coulier F
Laboratoire d'Oncologie Moléculaire, U119 Inserm, Marseille, France.
FEBS Lett. 2001 Mar 2;491(3):237-42. doi: 10.1016/s0014-5793(01)02187-1.
Homeobox genes encode important developmental control proteins. In vertebrates, those encoding the proteins of the HOX class and their most closely related families, including paraHOX and metaHOX classes, are clustered in paralogous regions (or paralogons). We show that the majority of the other homeobox genes (we called contraHOX) can also be clustered and belong to paralogons in humans. This suggests that they duplicated during vertebrate evolution along the same processes as the HOX genes. We tentatively assembled several paralogons in superparalogons. One of the superparalogons contains the contraHOX genes. These observations were extended to hundreds of genes, and allowed to describe a primary human genome paralogy map.
同源框基因编码重要的发育控制蛋白。在脊椎动物中，那些编码HOX类蛋白及其最密切相关家族（包括副HOX和元HOX类）的基因，聚集在旁系同源区域（或旁系同源组）中。我们发现，大多数其他同源框基因（我们称为反HOX）在人类中也可以聚集并属于旁系同源组。这表明它们在脊椎动物进化过程中与HOX基因沿着相同的过程发生了复制。我们初步将几个旁系同源组组装成了超级旁系同源组。其中一个超级旁系同源组包含反HOX基因。这些观察结果扩展到了数百个基因，并得以描绘出一幅人类基因组的初级旁系同源图谱。
