Yang Jing, Li Wen-Hsiung
Department of Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Gene. 2004 Oct 13;340(2):237-40. doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2004.06.057.
A previous study in nematodes suggested that developmental constraint reduces the duplicability of genes involved in early development. Recent large-scale gene expression studies of fly development enabled us to conduct a more detailed study of this issue. We found that the average duplicability of genes involved in embryonic development is indeed lower than that of genes involved in larval development but not significantly lower than that of genes involved in later stages of development. Moreover, in both flies and nematodes genes with multiple expression peaks do not seem to have a lower duplicability than do genes with a single expression peak. Thus, although developmental constraint does appear to reduce gene duplicability, the effect seems weak or at best moderate.
先前一项针对线虫的研究表明，发育限制降低了参与早期发育的基因的可复制性。最近对果蝇发育进行的大规模基因表达研究使我们能够对这个问题进行更详细的研究。我们发现，参与胚胎发育的基因的平均可复制性确实低于参与幼虫发育的基因，但并不显著低于参与发育后期的基因。此外，在果蝇和线虫中，具有多个表达峰值的基因的可复制性似乎并不比具有单个表达峰值的基因低。因此，虽然发育限制似乎确实会降低基因的可复制性，但这种影响似乎很弱，充其量也只是中等程度。
