Coexpression of neighboring genes in the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana.

Large-scale analyses of expression data of eukaryotic organisms are now becoming increasingly routine. The data sets are revealing interesting and novel patterns of genomic organization, which provide insight both into molecular evolution and how structure and function of a genome interrelate. Our study investigates, for the first time, how genome organization affects expression of a gene in the Arabidopsis genome.

Natural selection promotes the conservation of linkage of co-expressed genes.

Although there is increasing evidence that eukaryotic gene order is not always random, there is no evidence that putatively favourable gene arrangements are preserved by selection more than expected by chance. In yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), for example, co-expressed genes tend to be linked, but whether such gene pairs tend to remain linked more often than expected under null neutral expectations is not known. We show using gene pairs in the S.

Clustering of tissue-specific genes underlies much of the similarity in rates of protein evolution of linked genes.

Are genes nonrandomly distributed around the genome and might this explain why it was found that, in the mouse genome, proteins of linked genes evolve at similar rates? Anecdotal evidence suggests that the similarity of expression of linked genes might, in part, explain the similarity in their rates of evolution. Immune system genes, for example, are known to evolve at a high rate and sometimes cluster in the genome. Here we develop methods for statistical tests of similarity of expression of linked genes and report that there is a significant tendency for genes of similar expression breadth to be linked.