Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Automated Method For Rapid Identification Of Putative Gene Family Members In Plants, Ronald L. Frank, Ajay Mane, Fikret Erçal

Biological Sciences Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: Gene duplication events have played a significant role in genome evolution, particularly in plants. Exhaustive searches for all members of a known gene family as well as the identification of new gene families has become increasingly important. Subfunctionalization via changes in regulatory sequences following duplication (adaptive selection) appears to be a common mechanism of evolution in plants and can be accompanied by purifying selection on the coding region. Such negative selection can be detected by a bias toward synonymous over nonsynonymous substitutions. However, the process of identifying this bias requires many steps usually employing several different software programs. We …