Evolutionary Fates and Dynamic Functionalization of Young Duplicate Genes in Arabidopsis Genomes.

Gene duplication is a primary means to generate genomic novelties, playing an essential role in speciation and adaptation. Particularly in plants, a high abundance of duplicate genes has been maintained for significantly long periods of evolutionary time. To address the manner in which young duplicate genes were derived primarily from small-scale gene duplication and preserved in plant genomes and to determine the underlying driving mechanisms, we generated transcriptomes to produce the expression profiles of five tissues in Arabidopsis thaliana and the closely related species Arabidopsis lyrata and Capsella rubella Based on the quantitative analysis metrics, we investigated the evolutionary processes of young duplicate genes in Arabidopsis.

Divergence of gene body DNA methylation and evolution of plant duplicate genes.

It has been shown that gene body DNA methylation is associated with gene expression. However, whether and how deviation of gene body DNA methylation between duplicate genes can influence their divergence remains largely unexplored. Here, we aim to elucidate the potential role of gene body DNA methylation in the fate of duplicate genes.

Divergent evolutionary and expression patterns between lineage specific new duplicate genes and their parental paralogs in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Gene duplication is an important mechanism for the origination of functional novelties in organisms. We performed a comparative genome analysis to systematically estimate recent lineage specific gene duplication events in Arabidopsis thaliana and further investigate whether and how these new duplicate genes (NDGs) play a functional role in the evolution and adaption of A. thaliana.

High occurrence of functional new chimeric genes in survey of rice chromosome 3 short arm genome sequences.

In an effort to identify newly evolved genes in rice, we searched the genomes of Asian-cultivated rice Oryza sativa ssp. japonica and its wild progenitors, looking for lineage-specific genes. Using genome pairwise comparison of approximately 20-Mb DNA sequences from the chromosome 3 short arm (Chr3s) in six rice species, O.

Curcumin is an early-acting stage-specific inducer of extended functional longevity in Drosophila.

Larval feeding with curcumin induces an extended health span with significantly increased median and maximum longevities in the adult fly. This phenotype is diet insensitive and shows no additive effect on longevity when combined with an adult dietary restriction (DR) diet, suggesting that curcumin and DR operate via the same or overlapping pathways for this trait. This treatment significantly slows the aging rate so that it is comparable with that of genetically selected long lived animals.