Département de Biologie, Université Laval, Québec, QC, Canada.
The Quebec Network for Research on Protein Function, Engineering, and Applications, Université Laval, Québec, QC, Canada.
Science. 2017 Feb 10;355(6325):630-634. doi: 10.1126/science.aai7685.
The maintenance of duplicated genes is thought to protect cells from genetic perturbations, but the molecular basis of this robustness is largely unknown. By measuring the interaction of yeast proteins with their partners in wild-type cells and in cells lacking a paralog, we found that 22 out of 56 paralog pairs compensate for the lost interactions. An equivalent number of pairs exhibit the opposite behavior and require each other's presence for maintaining their interactions. These dependent paralogs generally interact physically, regulate each other's abundance, and derive from ancestral self-interacting proteins. This reveals that gene duplication may actually increase mutational fragility instead of robustness in a large number of cases.
人们认为，冗余基因的存在可以保护细胞免受遗传干扰，但这种稳健性的分子基础在很大程度上仍是未知的。通过测量酵母蛋白与其在野生型细胞和缺乏同源基因的细胞中的伴侣蛋白的相互作用，我们发现 56 对同源基因中，有 22 对补偿了失去的相互作用。数量相当的另一对则表现出相反的行为，它们需要彼此的存在才能维持相互作用。这些相互依赖的同源基因通常在物理上相互作用，调节彼此的丰度，并来源于具有自我相互作用的祖先蛋白。这表明，在许多情况下，基因复制实际上可能会增加突变的脆弱性，而不是稳健性。
