Evolutionary diversification of ancestral genes across vertebrates and insects.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Vertebrates and insects diverged approximately 700 million years ago, and yet they retain a large core of conserved genes from their last common ancestor. These ancient genes present strong evolutionary constraints, which limit their overall sequence and expression divergence. However, these constraints can greatly vary across ancestral gene families and, in at least some cases, sequence and expression changes can have functional consequences. Importantly, overall patterns of sequence and expression divergence and their potential functional outcomes have never been explored in a genome-wide manner across large animal evolutionary distances.

Results

We focus on approximately 7000 highly conserved genes shared between vertebrates and insects, and we investigate glob

SUBMITTER: Mantica F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12412249 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature