DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Evolutionary Fate of Gene Duplications in Morning Glories (Ipomoea)

Mark Rausher博士和David Des Marais博士的这项研究试图了解当一个有机体拥有相同遗传物质的两个副本时，随着进化时间的推移会发生什么。一般的逻辑是，如果从历史上看，一个生物体只需要一个基因的拷贝就能生存，那么同一个基因的第二个拷贝就没有必要了。对于这些复制对可能发生的情况，人们提出了三种常见的命运：一个副本可能继续发挥单一副本的功能，而第二个副本经历突变，导致其失去功能或获得新的功能，或者两个副本可能最终共享祖先的功能，从而成为有机体生存所必需的。后两种命运为导致生物多样性增加的新特征的起源提供了丰富的来源。拟议的研究对科学界很有价值，因为它将有助于解释最近基因组测序项目的一些发现；即，为什么重复基因持续存在，它们在做什么？该项目还将通过培训经常在我们实验室度过暑假的高中生和大学生，帮助扩大人们对使用科学方法探索自然观察的兴趣。

This research by Dr. Mark Rausher and David Des Marais seeks to understand what happens over evolutionary time when an organism has two copies of the same genetic material. The general logic is that if, historically, an organism only needs one copy of a gene to survive, then a second copy of the same gene will be unnecessary. Three general fates have been proposed for what might happen to these duplicated pairs: one copy might keep functioning as it did as a single copy while the second copy experiences mutations that either cause it to lose function or to gain novel function, or the two copies might end up sharing the ancestral functions and thereby both become necessary for the organism's survival. These latter two fates provide a rich source for the origin of new features that lead to an increase in biological diversity.The proposed research is valuable to the scientific community because it will help explain some of the findings of recent genome sequencing projects; namely, why do duplicate genes persist and what are they doing? The project will also help to expand interest in exploring natural observations using a scientific approach through training high school and college students who routinely spend summers in our laboratory.