Mol Biol Evol. 2012 Jul;29(7):1703-6. doi: 10.1093/molbev/mss014. Epub 2012 Jan 19.
Recently duplicated genes are believed to often overlap in function and expression. A priori, they are thus less likely to be essential. Although this was indeed observed in yeast, mouse singletons and duplicates were reported to be equally often essential. This contradiction can only partly be explained by experimental biases. We herein show that older genes (i.e., genes with earlier phyletic origin) are more likely to be essential, regardless of their duplication status. At a given phyletic gene age, duplicates are always less likely to be essential compared with singletons. The "paradoxical" high essentiality among mouse gene duplicates is then caused by different age profiles of singletons and duplicates, with the latter tending to be derived from older genes.
最近复制的基因在功能和表达上往往重叠。因此，它们不太可能是必需的。尽管在酵母中确实观察到了这种情况，但报道称，小鼠的单倍体和同源基因同样经常是必需的。这种矛盾只能部分地通过实验偏差来解释。我们在此表明，无论其复制状态如何，较老的基因（即具有更早的种系起源的基因）更有可能是必需的。在给定的种系基因年龄下，与单倍体相比，同源基因总是不太可能是必需的。因此，小鼠基因同源基因中“矛盾”的高必需性是由单倍体和同源基因的不同年龄分布造成的，后者往往来自较老的基因。
