Evolutionary Genomics Group, Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics, Hospital del Mar Research Institute (IMIM) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain.
Single Cell Behavior Group, Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain.
Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 27;12(1):604. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-20911-3.
De novo gene origination has been recently established as an important mechanism for the formation of new genes. In organisms with a large genome, intergenic and intronic regions provide plenty of raw material for new transcriptional events to occur, but little is know about how de novo transcripts originate in more densely-packed genomes. Here, we identify 213 de novo originated transcripts in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using deep transcriptomics and genomic synteny information from multiple yeast species grown in two different conditions. We find that about half of the de novo transcripts are expressed from regions which already harbor other genes in the opposite orientation; these transcripts show similar expression changes in response to stress as their overlapping counterparts, and some appear to translate small proteins. Thus, a large fraction of de novo genes in yeast are likely to co-evolve with already existing genes.
从头基因起源最近被确立为新基因形成的重要机制。在基因组较大的生物体中，基因间区和内含子区为新的转录事件提供了大量的原始材料，但对于更密集基因组中从头转录本的起源知之甚少。在这里，我们使用来自两种不同条件下生长的多种酵母物种的深度转录组学和基因组同线性信息，在酿酒酵母中鉴定了 213 个从头起源的转录本。我们发现，大约一半的从头转录本是从已经在相反方向上含有其他基因的区域表达的；这些转录本在应激反应中表现出与重叠对应物相似的表达变化，并且一些似乎翻译小蛋白。因此，酵母中的大量从头基因可能与已经存在的基因共同进化。
