Gene duplication as a mechanism of genomic adaptation to a changing environment

By Fyodor A. Kondrashov. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2012

648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A subject of extensive study in evolutionary theory has been the issue of how neutral, redundant copies can be maintained in the genome for long periods of time. Concurrently, examples of adaptive gene duplications to various environmental conditions in different species have been described. At this point, it is too early to tell whether or not a substantial fraction of gene copies have initially achieved fixation by positive selection for increased dosage. Nevertheless, enough examples have accumulated in the literature that such a possibility should be considered. Here, I review the recent examples of adaptive gene duplications and make an attempt to draw generalizations on what types of genes may be particularly prone to be selected for under certain environmental conditions. The identification of copy-number variation in ecological field studies of species adapting to stressful or novel environmental conditions may improve our understanding of gene duplications as a mechanism of adaptation and its relevance to the long-term persistence of gene duplications.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ebc8038e7beded11c4f543f628caba6ac89cad2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Molecular Biology

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Mechanisms of receptor tyrosine kinase activation in cancer (2018, positive): “In nature, gene duplication is one method by which species introduce genetic novelty or redundancy, thereby allowing them to adapt to various environmental conditions [147].”
The transcriptional landscape of polyploid wheat (2018, background): “Polyploidy may confer phenotypic plasticity by allowing homoeologs to be expressed differently across tissues and/or environmental conditions (8).”
Shifting the limits in wheat research and breeding using a fully annotated reference genome (2018, background): “Gene duplication and gene-family expansion are important mechanisms of evolution and environmental adaptation, as well as major contributors to phenotypic diversity (42, 43).”
Fantastically plastic: fish larvae equipped for a new world (2013, background): “Genome evolution is complex and appears to have involved several rounds of whole-genome duplication followed by gene decay (Meyer & van de Peer 2005; Kondrashov 2012).”