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Updated: Jan 3, 2026

Quantitative Comparison of cis-Regulatory Element CRE Activities in Transgenic Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: December 19, 2011
Regulation plays a multifaceted role in the retention of gene duplicates
Johan Hallin1,2,3,4,5, Christian R Landry1,2,3,4,5
1Département de biochimie, microbiologie et bio-informatique, Faculté des sciences et de génie, Université Laval, Québec, Canada.
Abstract:
A gene duplication can lead to all sorts of problems in a cell. However, it can also lead to all sorts of benefits. Beneficial or not, the gene duplicates might be kept in the genome because of several different reasons. For instance, if natural selection works towards optimizing one function of a gene at the expense of another, then gene duplication could resolve this conflict by separating the functions in two genes. Here, we outline evolutionary incentives to keep a duplicated gene in the genome, focusing on divergence in expression and trade-off resolution as featured in a new and exciting paper published in this edition of PLOS Biology.
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