RAINIS VENTA, WIKIMEDIA
Gene duplications are a major contributor to functional diversity within species. At times, extra copies of a gene can act as a backup mechanism to compensate when one gene fails. Some duplicated pairs, however, are dependent on one another, and the loss of one will lead to the failure of the other, according to a yeast genetics study published last week (February 9) in Science.
“One of the main mechanisms that people identified years ago was that gene duplications promoted the robustness of cells,” said coauthor Christian Landry, an evolutionary geneticist at Laval University in Canada. “People have observed at the genetic level that if you have two copies of the gene and you remove one, then nothing happens.”
Landry and colleagues sought to determine ...
