Reconstructing the History of Yeast Genomes

David Sankoff,Jianzhi Zhang

doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000483

Abstract

Reconstructing the History of Yeast Genomes

Highlights

Some 12 years ago, Wolfe and colleagues demonstrated that Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the descendant of an ancient whole-genome duplication event [1,2], much to the consternation of many of those who had recently completed the sequencing of this yeast [3], the first eukaryotic nuclear genome to be sequenced
A preliminary step in the method of Gordon et al is the inference of the gene content at the ancestral nodes of the assumed phylogenetic tree of 11 yeast species
As is abundantly illustrated in the Research Article [8], syntenic information is crucially useful in many ways, such as: (1) confining the evolutionarily most volatile parts of the genome to subtelomeric regions, allowing the rest to be analyzed with great confidence; (2) identifying the location of the original member of dispersed gene families; (3) detecting the orthologies of fast-evolving genes; (4) identifying true gene gains; and (5) showing which genes arose from transposable elements and demonstrating the domesticated status of certain of these genes

Summary

Introduction

Some 12 years ago, Wolfe and colleagues demonstrated that Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the descendant of an ancient whole-genome duplication event [1,2], much to the consternation of many of those who had recently completed the sequencing of this yeast [3], the first eukaryotic nuclear genome to be sequenced. A preliminary step in the method of Gordon et al is the inference of the gene content at the ancestral nodes of the assumed phylogenetic tree of 11 yeast species.

Results

Conclusion