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Updated: Oct 27, 2025

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Retention of duplicated genes in evolution
Elena Kuzmin1, John S Taylor2, Charles Boone3
1Department of Biochemistry, Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre, McGill University, 1160 Ave des Pins Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1A3.
Abstract:
Gene duplication is a prevalent phenomenon across the tree of life. The processes that lead to the retention of duplicated genes are not well understood. Functional genomics approaches in model organisms, such as yeast, provide useful tools to test the mechanisms underlying retention with functional redundancy and divergence of duplicated genes, including fates associated with neofunctionalization, subfunctionalization, back-up compensation, and dosage amplification. Duplicated genes may also be retained as a consequence of structural and functional entanglement. Advances in human gene editing have enabled the interrogation of duplicated genes in the human genome, providing new tools to evaluate the relative contributions of each of these factors to duplicate gene retention and the evolution of genome structure.
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