Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Genome Biol Evol. 2011;3:295-301. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evr016. Epub 2011 Mar 14.
Epistasis has long been recognized as fundamentally important in understanding the structure, function, and evolutionary dynamics of biological systems. Gene duplication is a major mechanism of evolution for genetic novelties. Here, we demonstrate that genes evolved significantly more epistatic interactions after duplication. The connectivity of duplicate gene pairs in epistatic networks is positively correlated with the extent of their sequence divergence. Furthermore, duplicate gene pairs tend to epistatically interact with genes that occupy more functional spaces than do single-copy genes. These results show that gene duplication plays an important role in the evolution of epistasis.
上位性作用长期以来一直被认为是理解生物系统的结构、功能和进化动态的基础。基因复制是遗传创新的主要进化机制。在这里，我们证明了基因在复制后会产生更多的上位性相互作用。在上位性网络中，重复基因对的连接性与它们序列差异的程度呈正相关。此外，重复基因对倾向于与占据更多功能空间的基因发生上位性相互作用，而不是单拷贝基因。这些结果表明，基因复制在上位性进化中起着重要作用。
