Gene duplication provides an important evolutionary mechanism for functional diversification. A new study in Drosophila indicates that gene duplication has allowed telomere protection to be partitioned between the soma and the specialized chromatin environment of sperm.

During evolution, organisms have gained functional complexity mainly by modifying and improving existing functioning systems rather than creating new ones ab initio. Here we explore the interplay between two processes which during evolution have had major roles in the acquisition of new functions: gene duplication and protein domain rearrangements. We consider four possible evolutionary scenari...

Although gene duplication is widely believed to be the major source of genetic novelty, how the expression or regulatory network of duplicate genes evolves remains poorly understood. In this article, we propose an additive expression distance between duplicate genes, so that the evolutionary rate of expression divergence after gene duplication can be estimated through phylogenomic analysis. We ...

The discovery of seven unlinked Hox gene clusters in zebrafish (Danio rerio) and two HoxA gene clusters in the pufferfish (Takifugu rubripes) led to the hypothesis that a genome duplication event occurred early during the evolution of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) [1]. Shortly thereafter, Wittbrodt and co-workers [2] uncovered many additional examples of genes that appeared to have been du...

1.1. Susumu Ohno Susumu Ohno was born in 1928 and died in the year 2000. He had spent more than 40 years in the City of Hope in Los Angeles, USA. One of his famous books is Evolution by Gene Duplication, which was published in 1970 (1). In this book, he pointed out that genome duplication and gene duplication are very important not only for evolution but also for function and structures of the ...