Wang Zhen, Ding Guohui, Yu Zhonghao, Liu Lei, Li Yixue
Key Lab of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, PR China.
Genomics. 2009 Feb;93(2):146-51. doi: 10.1016/j.ygeno.2008.10.008. Epub 2008 Dec 1.
Gene duplication is a fundamental source of genetic novelty in vertebrate evolution. In this study, we hypothesized that both continuous small-scale and discrete large-scale duplication play crucial roles in vertebrate genome. On the basis of the hypothesis, we developed mixture density to model the age distribution of gene duplications. The results of formal statistical inference suggest that the contribution of both duplication modes can be confirmed by the model, and one or two successive rounds of large-scale duplication are placed at the early origin of vertebrates. The half life of a duplicate becomes much longer in the long run than in the short run, which implies its functional evolution from redundancy to conservation. In addition, the model reveals disparate impact of the duplication modes, which appears to be correlated with macroevolution.
基因复制是脊椎动物进化过程中遗传新奇性的一个基本来源。在本研究中，我们假设连续的小规模复制和离散的大规模复制在脊椎动物基因组中都起着关键作用。基于这一假设，我们开发了混合密度模型来模拟基因复制的年龄分布。正式统计推断的结果表明，该模型可以证实两种复制模式的贡献，并且一到两轮连续的大规模复制发生在脊椎动物的早期起源阶段。从长远来看，复制基因的半衰期比短期要长得多，这意味着其功能从冗余向保守进化。此外，该模型揭示了复制模式的不同影响，这似乎与宏观进化相关。
