FURTHER SIMULATION STUDIES ON EVOLUTION BY GENE DUPLICATION.

Abstract

In order to understand the origin of multigene families, Monte Carlo simulations were performed to see how a genetic system evolves under unequal crossing-over, mutation, random genetic drift and natural selection, starting from a single gene copy. Both haploid and diploid models were examined. Beneficial, neutral, and detrimental mutations were incorporated, and "positive" selection favors those chromosomes (haploid) or individuals (diploid) with more beneficial mutations than others. The same model for haploids was previously investigated with special reference to the evolution of gene organization, and the ratio of the numbers of beneficial genes to pseudogenes was found to be a rough indicator of the relative strengths of positive and negative (against deleterious alleles) natural selection (Ohta, 1987b). In the present paper, the evolution of gene organization and of sequence divergence among genes in the multigene family is examined. It is shown that positive selection accelerates the accumulation of arrays containing different beneficial mutations, but that total divergence including both neutral and beneficial mutations is not very sensitive to positive selection, under this model. The proportion of beneficial mutations in the total mutations accumulated is a better indicator of positive selection than is the total divergence. It is pointed out that various observed examples in which amino-acid substitutions are accelerated, as compared with synonymous substitutions in duplicated genes (Li, 1985), may reflect the effect of selection similar to the present scheme. The diploid model is shown to be more efficient for accumulating beneficial mutations in duplicated genes than the haploid one, and the relevance of this finding to the advantage of sexual reproduction is discussed.