Marland Elizabeth, Prachumwat Anuphap, Maltsev Natalia, Gu Zhenglong, Li Wen-Hsiung
Mathematics & Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 South Cass Avenue, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.
J Mol Evol. 2004 Dec;59(6):806-14. doi: 10.1007/s00239-004-0068-x.
Although the evolutionary significance of gene duplication has long been appreciated, it remains unclear what factors determine gene duplicability. In this study we investigated whether metabolism is an important determinant of gene duplicability because cellular metabolism is crucial for the survival and reproduction of an organism. Using genomic data and metabolic pathway data from the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and Escherichia coli, we found that metabolic proteins indeed tend to have higher gene duplicability than nonmetabolic proteins. Moreover, a detailed analysis of metabolic pathways in these two organisms revealed that genes in the central metabolic pathways and the catabolic pathways have, on average, higher gene duplicability than do other genes and that most genes in anabolic pathways are single-copy genes.
尽管基因复制的进化意义早已为人所认识，但仍不清楚哪些因素决定基因的可复制性。在本研究中，我们调查了代谢是否是基因可复制性的一个重要决定因素，因为细胞代谢对生物体的生存和繁殖至关重要。利用来自酵母（酿酒酵母）和大肠杆菌的基因组数据和代谢途径数据，我们发现代谢蛋白确实比非代谢蛋白具有更高的基因可复制性。此外，对这两种生物体中代谢途径的详细分析表明，中心代谢途径和分解代谢途径中的基因平均而言比其他基因具有更高的基因可复制性，并且合成代谢途径中的大多数基因是单拷贝基因。
