Gene and genome duplication

Abstract

Genomic sequencing projects have revealed the productivity of processes duplicating genes or entire chromosome segments. Substantial proportions of the yeast, Arabidopsis and human gene complements are made up of duplicates. This has prompted much interest in the processes of duplication, functional divergence and loss of genes, has renewed the debate on whether an early vertebrate genome was tetraploid, and has inspired mathematical models and algorithms in computational biology.