Cooke J, Nowak M A, Boerlijst M, Maynard-Smith J
Division of Developmental Neurobiology, National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK.
Trends Genet. 1997 Sep;13(9):360-4. doi: 10.1016/s0168-9525(97)01233-x.
Various levels of redundancy in developmental gene function appear common in complex metazoans. There might be no apparent phenotype at many, or even any, of a gene's specific expression sites in homozygous null mutant embryos. Here we ask what underlies the origin of such arrangements. The generation of families of genes by duplication has clearly been important. Additionally, however, selection might have driven molecularly unrelated genes, which encode proteins of similar physiological function, to become expressed during the same sets of developmental events (times and places), even though each such gene might initially have evolved in connection with just one of these events.
发育基因功能中的各种冗余水平在复杂的后生动物中似乎很常见。在纯合无效突变胚胎中，基因的许多甚至任何特定表达位点可能都没有明显的表型。在这里，我们探讨这种排列的起源背后的原因。通过基因复制产生基因家族显然很重要。然而，此外，选择可能促使分子上不相关但编码具有相似生理功能蛋白质的基因，在同一组发育事件（时间和地点）中表达，即使每个这样的基因最初可能仅与这些事件中的一个相关进化。
