WIKIMEDIA, MUHAMMAD MAHDI KARIMIn the last few years, scientists have come to realize that genes really can arise from formerly noncoding regions of the genome. Indeed, comparing the genomes of related species has even suggested that such de novo gene formation may be quite common. Today, the first-ever within-population search for novel genes supports this idea. Publishing in Science, researchers at the University of California, Davis, present a total of 142 transcripts that are expressed in some or all six Drosophila melanogaster strains they examined, but that corresponded to intergenic sequences of the D. melanogaster reference genome.
“Until recently, de novo origin of genes was considered to be so unlikely as to be impossible,” comparative genomicist Aoife McLysaght of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “[T]his population level analysis is important because it gives a new insight into the very early stages of the origin and establishment of genes de novo.”
“To show [the formation of de novo genes] at the population genetics level is really a nice story,” agreed evolutionary biologist Diethard Tautz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, who also did not participate in the research. “It shows the power of generating from nothing, so to speak.”
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