Abstract
Genome comparisons between 12 Drosophila species elucidate the origins of retroposition events that have led to the emergence of candidate functional genes.
Highlights
Processed copies of genes are duplicate genes that originated through the reverse-transcription of a host transcript and insertion in the genome
Six of the retrogenes appear to have arisen from partial retroposition events, where, in the alignment of the protein coding region of parental and retrogene, the retrogene appears slightly shorter at the 5' ends compared to the parental gene
We required the pairs parental/retrogene to align over at least 70% of the proteins encoded by each gene and this precluded us from finding other types of chimeric retrogenes
Summary
Processed copies of genes (retrogenes) are duplicate genes that originated through the reverse-transcription of a host transcript and insertion in the genome. Retrogenes are processed copies of genes that originate through reverse-transcription of a parental mRNA and insertion into the organism's genome [1]. This duplication mechanism produces a copy of the parental gene that should not contain introns, or most cis-regulatory regions. Functional processed copies of genes can emerge as intronless duplications of the parental transcript [3,6] or recruit additional exons from the insertion site, producing a chimeric gene. The first retrogene described in Drosophila, jingwei, is Genome Biology 2007, 8:R11
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