High spontaneous rate of gene duplication in Caenorhabditis elegans.

ABSTRACT: Gene and genome duplications are the primary source of new genes and novel functions and have played a pivotal role in the evolution of genomic and organismal complexity. The spontaneous rate of gene duplication is a critical parameter for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of gene duplicates; yet few direct empirical estimates exist and differ widely. The presence of a large population of recently derived gene duplicates in sequenced genomes suggests a high rate of spontaneous origin, also evidenced by population genomic studies reporting rampant copy-number polymorphism at the intraspecific level. An analysis of long-term mutation accumulation lines of Caenorhabditis elegans for gene copy-number changes with array comparative genomic hybridization yields the first direct estimate of

SUBMITTER: Lipinski KJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3056611 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature