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Genome evolution

Doubling or splicing: the intimate relationship

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 6, page 519 (2005)Cite this article

Alternative splicing and gene duplication are evolutionary forces that drive new biological functions. But how do these two modes of functional diversification relate to each other?

A study from Kopelman and colleagues now reveals an inverse corellation between the size of a gene's family and its propensity to produce alternative splice variants. Through evaluation of human gene families with reference to species with different times of divergence, the authors show that genes of family size 1 (singletons) use alternative splicing more than genes that have undergone duplications. Furthermore, comparisons between human and mouse orthologues under different duplication models show that the rate of alternative splicing is three times higher in conserved singletons than in genes that have been duplicated in both lineages.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Kopelman, N. M. et al. Alternative splicing and gene duplication are inversely correlated evolutionary mechanisms. Nature Genet. 15 May 2005 (10.1038/ng1575)

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Authors
  1. Ekat Kritikou
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Kritikou, E. Doubling or splicing: the intimate relationship. Nat Rev Genet 6, 519 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1648

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