Two Rounds of Whole Genome Duplication in the Ancestral Vertebrate

The hypothesis that the relatively large and complex vertebrate genome was created by two ancient, whole genome duplications has been hotly debated, but remains unresolved. We reconstructed the evolutionary relationships of all gene families from the complete gene sets of a tunicate, fish, mouse, and human, and then determined when each gene duplicated relative to the evolutionary tree of the organisms. We confirmed the results of earlier studies that there remains little signal of these events in numbers of duplicated genes, gene tree topology, or the number of genes per multigene family. However, when we plotted the genomic map positions of only the subset of paralogous genes that were duplicated prior to…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Energy

  Awards: AC03-76SF00098, DE-AC03-76SF00098, DE-AC03
• BA
  Biological and Environmental Research
• LB
  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  Award: DE-AC03-76SF00098