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Updated: Aug 7, 2026

An Efficient Strategy for Generating Tissue-specific Binary Transcription Systems in Drosophila by Genome Editing
Published on: September 19, 2018
Repression and loss of gene expression outpaces activation and gain in recently duplicated fly genes
Todd H Oakley1, Bjørn Ostman, Asa C V Wilson
1Ecology Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. oakley@lifesci.ucsb.edu
Abstract:
Evolutionists widely acknowledge that regulatory genetic changes are of paramount importance for morphological and genomic evolution. Nevertheless, mechanistic complexity and a paucity of data from nonmodel organisms have prevented testing and quantifying universal hypotheses about the macroevolution of gene regulatory mechanisms. Here, we use a phylogenetic approach to provide a quantitative demonstration of a previously hypothesized trend, whereby the evolutionary rate of repression or loss of gene expression regions is significantly higher than the rate of activation or gain. Such a trend is expected based on case studies in regulatory evolution and under models of molecular evolution where duplicated genes lose duplicated expression patterns in a complementary fashion. The trend is important because repression of gene expression is a hypothesized mechanism for the origin of evolutionarily novel morphologies through specialization.
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