Following tetraploidy in maize, a short deletion mechanism removed genes preferentially from one of the two homologs.

ABSTRACT: Previous work in Arabidopsis showed that after an ancient tetraploidy event, genes were preferentially removed from one of the two homologs, a process known as fractionation. The mechanism of fractionation is unknown. We sought to determine whether such preferential, or biased, fractionation exists in maize and, if so, whether a specific mechanism could be implicated in this process. We studied the process of fractionation using two recently sequenced grass species: sorghum and maize. The maize lineage has experienced a tetraploidy since its divergence from sorghum approximately 12 million years ago, and fragments of many knocked-out genes retain enough sequence similarity to be easily identifiable. Using sorghum exons as the query sequence, we studied the fate of both orthologous genes in

SUBMITTER: Woodhouse MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2893956 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature