Rapid divergence in expression between duplicate genes inferred from microarray data.

For more than 30 years, expression divergence has been considered as a major reason for retaining duplicated genes in a genome, but how often and how fast duplicate genes diverge in expression has not been studied at the genomic level. Using yeast microarray data, we show that expression divergence between duplicate genes is significantly correlated with their synonymous divergence (K(S)) and also with their nonsynonymous divergence (K(A)) if K(A) 80% for K(S) > 1.5. Only a small fraction of ancient gene pairs do not show expression divergence.