Homeobox Gene Duplication and Divergence in Arachnids

Gene Duplication and Functional Divergence

Allelic divergence precedes and promotes gene duplication.

One of the striking observations from recent whole-genome comparisons is that changes in the number of specialized genes in existing gene families, as opposed to novel taxon-specific gene families, are responsible for the majority of the difference in genome composition between major taxa. Previous models of duplicate gene evolution focused primarily on the role that neutral processes can play ...

Gene duplication and divergence affecting drug content in Cannabis sativa.

Cannabis sativa is an economically important source of durable fibers, nutritious seeds, and psychoactive drugs but few economic plants are so poorly understood genetically. Marijuana and hemp were crossed to evaluate competing models of cannabinoid inheritance and to explain the predominance of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) in marijuana compared with cannabidiolic acid (CBDA) in hemp. Ind...

Opsin gene duplication and divergence in ray-finned fish.

Opsin gene sequences were first reported in the 1980s. The goal of that research was to test the hypothesis that human opsins were members of a single gene family and that variation in human color vision was mediated by mutations in these genes. While the new data supported both hypotheses, the greatest contribution of this work was, arguably, that it provided the data necessary for PCR-based s...

Concerted Divergence after Gene Duplication in Polycomb Repressive Complexes.

Duplicated genes are a major contributor to genome evolution and phenotypic novelty. There are multiple possible evolutionary fates of duplicated genes. Here, we provide an example of concerted divergence of simultaneously duplicated genes whose products function in the same complex. We studied POLYCOMB REPRESSIVE COMPLEX2 (PRC2) in Brassicaceae. The VERNALIZATION (VRN)-PRC2 complex contains VR...