To the beat of a different drum: determinants implicated in the asymmetric sequence divergence of Caenorhabditis elegans paralogs.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Gene duplicates often exhibit asymmetric rates of molecular evolution in their early evolutionary existence. This asymmetry in rates is thought to signify the maintenance of the ancestral function by one copy and the removal of functional constraint on the other copy, enabling it to embark on a novel evolutionary trajectory. Here I focused on a large population of evolutionarily young gene duplicates (KS ≤ 0.14) in the Caenorhabditis elegans genome in order to conduct the first combined analysis of four predictors (evolutionary age, chromosomal location, structural resemblance between duplicates, and duplication span) which may be implicated in the asymmetric sequence divergence of paralogs at the nucleotide and amino acid level. In addition, I investigate if either para

SUBMITTER: Katju V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3637608 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature