The Genomic Impact of Gene Retrocopies: What Have We Learned from Comparative Genomics, Population Genomics, and Transcriptomic Analyses?

ABSTRACT: Gene duplication is a major driver of organismal evolution. Gene retroposition is a mechanism of gene duplication whereby a gene's transcript is used as a template to generate retroposed gene copies, or retrocopies. Intriguingly, the formation of retrocopies depends upon the enzymatic machinery encoded by retrotransposable elements, genomic parasites occurring in the majority of eukaryotes. Most retrocopies are depleted of the regulatory regions found upstream of their parental genes; therefore, they were initially considered transcriptionally incompetent gene copies, or retropseudogenes. However, examples of functional retrocopies, or retrogenes, have accumulated since the 1980s. Here, we review what we have learned about retrocopies in animals, plants and other eukaryotic organisms, with

SUBMITTER: Casola C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5470649 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature