Faster evolving Drosophila paralogs lose expression rate and ubiquity and accumulate more non-synonymous SNPs

Duplicated genes can indefinately persist in genomes if either both copies retain the original function due to dosage benefit (gene conservation), or one of the copies assumes a novel function (neofunctionalization), or both copies become required to perform the function previously accomplished by a single copy (subfunctionalization), or through a combination of these mechanisms. Different models of duplication retention imply different predictions about substitution rates in the coding portion of paralogs and about asymmetry of these rates.

We analyse sequence evolution asymmetry in paralogs present in 12 Drosophila genomes using the nearest non-duplicated orthologous outgroup as a reference. Those paralogs present in D. melanogaster are analysed in conjunction with the asymmetry of expression rate and ubiquity and of segregating non-synonymous polymorphisms in the same paralogs. Paralogs accumulate substitutions, on average, faster than their nearest singleton orthologs. The distribution of paralogs' substitution rate asymmetry is overdispersed relative to that of orthologous clades, containing disproportionally more unusually symmetric and unusually asymmetric clades. We show that paralogs are more asymmetric in: a) clades orthologous to highly constrained singleton genes; b) genes with high expression level; c) genes with ubiquitous expression and d) non-tandem duplications. We further demonstrate that, in each asymmetrically evolving pair of paralogs, the faster evolving member of the pair tends to have lower average expression rate, lower expression uniformity and higher frequency of non-synonymous SNPs than its slower evolving counterpart.

Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that many duplications in Drosophila are retained despite stabilising selection being more relaxed in one of the paralogs than in the other, suggesting a widespread unfinished pseudogenization. This phenomenon is likely to make detection of neo- and subfunctionalization signatures difficult, as these models of duplication retention also predict asymmetries in substitution rates and expression profiles.