Abstract

Gene family proliferation has provided the raw materials for functional innovations in many organisms. Although many models have been proposed on how duplicate genes have undergone functional divergence and survived in the long-term evolution, the details remain largely unknown. In this review paper, recent developments about this important issue have been discussed with special references to the implication for functional genomics. With a combination of large-scale genome sequencing and powerful computational analysis, we show that a great deal of functional information can be obtained from the evolutionary perspective, which can in turn be used to facilitate high throughput functional assays.

Keywords: functional genomics, gene divergence, duplicate gene, gene sequence, functional divergence