Sharing Duties in the Family
- Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The eukaryotic genomes expand their sizes via several different pathways, one of which is the duplication of existing gene(s). According to the classical model by Ohno (1970), one purpose of gene duplication is to allow for evolutionary gain of new function(s). Indeed, gene duplications were well documented in the 1980's through extensive molecular cloning and sequencing of genes and pieces of genomic DNAs from different species. An excellent representative of the eukaryotic gene families identified from these studies encodes the oxygen-carrying globin chains in the vertebrate red cells. This family apparently expanded its size via a series events of tandem duplications and inter-chromosomal transpositions (Lewin 2000). Following duplications, the accumulated mutations in the regulatory regions of the different globin family members have led to the developmental regulation of their expression in the erythroid cells (Fraser and Grosveld 1998). At the same time, mutations in the coding regions of the individual globin genes also allowed for …
