Abstract
The incidence of gene shuffling is estimated in conserved genes in 10 organisms from the three domains of life. Successful gene shuffling is found to be very rare among such conserved genes. This suggests that gene shuffling may not be a major force in reshaping the core genomes of eukaryotes.
Highlights
Among three sources of evolutionary innovation in gene function - point mutations, gene duplications, and gene shuffling - gene shuffling is the most potent one
Laboratory evolution studies show that gene shuffling allows new gene functions to arise at rates of orders of magnitudes higher than point mutations [7,8]
Little gene shuffling in closely related genomes Mosaic proteins are not rare in most genomes, which suggests that successful gene shuffling might be frequent on an evolutionary timescale
Summary
Among three sources of evolutionary innovation in gene function - point mutations, gene duplications, and gene shuffling (recombination between dissimilar genes) - gene shuffling is the most potent one. We here choose to call only this kind of recombination gene shuffling, excluding, for example, duplication of domains within a gene. In such a gene shuffling event, the parental genes may be either destroyed or preserved [6]. Gene shuffling is clearly the most potent of the three causes of functional innovation because it can generate new genes with a structure drastically different from that of Genome Biology 2005, 6:R50. Laboratory evolution studies show that gene shuffling allows new gene functions to arise at rates of orders of magnitudes higher than point mutations [7,8]
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