Thursday, 25th March, 2021, 12:00

New gene explosion in three different organisms regardless of the mechanism of origin

PRBB Computational Genomics Seminar. Chair: Mar Albà (Head of Evolutionary Genomics Group).

New genes are constantly created in all organisms by two different mechanisms: gene duplication and de novo gene birth. The first mechanism generates an exact copy of a gene that will diverge from the original. On the other hand, de novo genes are originated from previously non-coding regions producing a completely original gene. Both mechanisms contribute to the generation of new genes, however, their relative contribution to short-time adaptation and long-term evolution is not well understood. In our group, we used a standard methodology to measure the rate of formation and persistence of both, de novo and duplicated genes in three different groups formed by yeasts, insects and vertebrates. We observed that independently of how new genes are formed the number of genes is higher at the species' level and then rapidly declines until a steady-state level. We also studied the purifying selection of groups of genes with polymorphism data and we observed weak purifying selection, that increases over time.

Zoom webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81073249721 / Password: 788137

Speaker: Jose Carlos Montañés, Evolutionary Genomics Group - Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB, IMIM/UPF)

Room Online