Rumraket
June 19, 2020, 11:49pm
66
For some reason I didn’t notice this last part of your post earlier. There was a thread devoted to a recent review article discussing what is currently known about mechanisms of so-called de novo gene evolution here:
PLoS Genetics has a nice, new review of what is known about the evolution of de novo genes, which seems to be a topical of perennial interest here.
De novo gene birth
De novo gene birth is the process by which new genes evolve from DNA sequences that were ancestrally non-genic. De novo genes represent a subset of novel genes, and may be protein-coding or instead act as RNA genes [1 ]. The processes that govern de novo gene birth ( Fig 1A ) are not well understood, though several models exist that describe possible mechanisms by which de novo gene birth may occur. Although de novo gene birth may have occurred at any point in an organism’s evolutionary history, ancient de novo gene birth events are difficult to detect. Most studies of de novo genes to date have thus focused on young genes, typically taxonomically-restricted genes (TRGs) that are present in a single species or lineage, including so-called orphan genes , defined as genes that lack any identifiable homolog. I…