gene duplication & robustness
Su Z & Gu X 2008 Predicting the proportion of essential genes in mouse duplicates based on biased mouse knockout genes. J Mol Evol 67:705-709.
- based on the publicly available mouse knockout data, it was observed that the proportion of essential genes in duplicates is similar to that in singletons
- in the current mouse knockout dataset, recently duplicated genes have been highly underrepresented, leading to an overestimation of the proportion of essential genes in duplicates
- duplicate genes are indeed less essential than single-copy genes in both the yeast and the nematode
- two recent papers, however, reported that the proportion of essential genes (PE) for singletons is similar to that for duplicates in mouse, based on the currently available mouse knockout phenotypes
- they came up with different explanations
- Liang and Li (2007) suggested that the potential compensatory role of gene duplication may have been counteracted by another factor―the more intrinsic importance of the duplicated genes
- Liao and Zhang (2007) argued that duplicated genes may have a negligible role in mouse genetic robustness
- our further extensive analysis indicates that duplicate genes play an important role in mouse genetic robustness (unpublished data)
