Experimental demonstration of functional compensation among paralogous genes encoding neuropeptides

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There is a general agreement that a whole genome duplication has occurred early during evolution to produce paralogous genes with diversified functions. Functional compensation of a deleted gene by its paralogous gene has been documented for unicellular organisms, but such functional compensation has not been demonstrated for multicellular organisms so far. We have recently found an example of possible functional compensation between the paralogous genes, kiss1 and kiss2, encoding peptides called kisspeptins, which are considered to be involved in the central regulation of reproduction and/or sexual behavior. Here, we attempted at demonstrating experimentally functional compensation mechanisms of kisspeptin genes using state-of-the-art gene knock-out techniques such as TALEN and CRISPR/Cas9, which can be applied to non-model organisms.