Ponce Rita
Centro de Biologia Ambiental, Departamento de Biologia Vegetal, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande edifício C2, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal.
Genetica. 2009 Apr;135(3):415-8. doi: 10.1007/s10709-008-9288-0. Epub 2008 Jun 28.
Gene families are composed of closely related genes and are an important part of eukaryotic genomes. In the proximal region of the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster there is a cluster of four tandem Sdic genes, located between the gene Cdic and the gene AnnX. Sdic is a chimeric gene that encodes a novel protein with sperm-specific expression. It had been hypothesized that the Sdic gene cluster was formed after the split of D. melanogaster and D. simulans. To study the evolution of this cluster, the sequence of this region was studied in several Drosophilidae species. In all species analyzed, Sdic genes are absent and AnnX and Cdic are adjacent to each other. The results allowed the inference of the ancestral situation and the reconstruction of the evolution of the cluster, and confirm that the Sdic cluster was indeed formed in the lineage that gave rise to D. melanogaster, being one of the youngest gene clusters known.
基因家族由密切相关的基因组成，是真核生物基因组的重要组成部分。在黑腹果蝇X染色体的近端区域，有一组四个串联的Sdic基因，位于基因Cdic和基因AnnX之间。Sdic是一个嵌合基因，编码一种具有精子特异性表达的新型蛋白质。据推测，Sdic基因簇是在黑腹果蝇和拟果蝇分化后形成的。为了研究这个基因簇的进化，在几种果蝇科物种中研究了该区域的序列。在所有分析的物种中，Sdic基因均不存在，AnnX和Cdic彼此相邻。这些结果有助于推断祖先的情况并重建基因簇的进化过程，并证实Sdic基因簇确实是在产生黑腹果蝇的谱系中形成的，是已知最年轻的基因簇之一。
