Gene duplication is a widely observed phenomenon in all three kingdoms of life and is considered to be a major driving force in the evolution of genomes and organisms. Gene duplication refers to any duplication event of a region of DNA that contains genes, eventually giving rise to gene families. In a classical sense, gene duplication is considered to predate functional diversification. When a ...

Recent analysis of complete eukaryotic genome sequences has revealed that gene duplication has been rampant. Moreover, next to a continuous mode of gene duplication, in many eukaryotic organisms the complete genome has been duplicated in their evolutionary past. Such large-scale gene duplication events have been associated with important evolutionary transitions or major leaps in development an...

Duplication is thought to be one of the main processes providing a substrate on which the effects of evolution are visible. The mechanisms underlying this chromosomal rearrangement were investigated here in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Spontaneous revertants containing a duplication event were selected and analyzed. In addition to the single gene duplication described in a previous study...

Lynch and Conery (1) presented one of the first serious efforts to study the evolutionary fate of gene duplication using genomic sequence data. Their analysis led to several interesting observations, particularly with respect to the rate of gene duplication in eukaryotic genomes and the subsequent halflife of duplicates. These two parameters are of particular importance in studying the evolutio...

Genomic sequencing projects have revealed the productivity of processes duplicating genes or entire chromosome segments. Substantial proportions of the yeast, Arabidopsis and human gene complements are made up of duplicates. This has prompted much interest in the processes of duplication, functional divergence and loss of genes, has renewed the debate on whether an early vertebrate genome was t...

Gene duplication is widely believed to facilitate adaptation, but unambiguous evidence for this hypothesis has been found in only a small number of cases. Although gene duplication may increase the fitness of the involved organisms by doubling gene dosage or neofunctionalization, it may also result in a simple division of ancestral functions into daughter genes, which need not promote adaptatio...

Gene copy-number differences due to gene duplications and deletions are rampant in natural populations and play a crucial role in the evolution of genome complexity. Per-locus analyses of gene duplication rates in the pre-genomic era revealed that gene duplication rates are much higher than the per nucleotide substitution rate. Analyses of gene duplication and deletion rates in mutation accumul...