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November 19, 2010
CSE Ph.D. student Benjamin VanderSluis, post-doctoral scientist Jeremy Bellay and their advisor Chad Myers recently had their work published in the Molecular Systems Biology journal. Their paper, “Genetic interactions reveal the evolutionary trajectories of duplicate genes,” presents new insights about how genes evolve based on network analysis of genetic interactions in yeast. The ancestor of modern day yeast underwent a whole-genome duplication event approximately 120 million years ago, from which ~10% of the genes have been retained in duplicate with very similar sequences. Since gene duplication is one of the major drivers of genome evolution, understanding how these duplicate sequences have evolved since then is a major focus of the yeast and evolution community. VanderSluis, Bellay, and Myers with collaborators at the University of Toronto, showed that the differences in genetic interactions between two duplicate genes can be used to infer how their functions have diverged, and found new evidence for a model that suggests that genes evolve highly asymmetrically after a duplication event.
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