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Manyuan Long
The University of Chicago - Bioinformatics Seminar
New Genes Behind Males
May 22, 2006 2:00pm
Abstract:
We are interested in origin and evolution of new genes. By the computational and experimental genomic analyses, we identified a large number of new retroposed genes that originated in Drosophila and Mammalian genomes. Position analyses of these genes and their parental paralogs revealed that a high excess of retrogenes had escaped from the X-linkage to autosomes in Drosophila, whereas in mammals the excess of gene movement in both directions between the X chromosome and autosomes were detected. Transcript analyses revealed that the vast majority of the X-derived autosomal retrogenes evolved expression in testis in both Drosophila and Mammals. Selection based multiple genetic mechanisms are likely involved in the out-of-X gene movement. We also observed that a surfeit of autosomal retroposed genes originated from parental genes located on the same chromosome, in contrast to the X chromosome in which only few genes retroposed in cis. Such an autosomal proximity effect implicates a role of the mutation process for retroposition in determining chromosomal locations of autosome-derived retroposed genes.The out-of-X patterns provide a likely mechanism for observed male gene enrichment in autosomes rather than previously speculated X over-representation. We further examined phenotypes of a new gene in Drosophila that generated male-specific transcripts by silencing the male specific expression using gene replacement technique. We observed that this gene, Sphinx, is likely involved in control of courtship behaviors.
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