Recent duplication and positive selection of the GAGE gene family.
We report that the GAGE gene family of human Cancer/testis antigen (CTA) genes is likely to be in an early stage of its evolution. Members of this gene family are tandemly arranged on the X chromosome only in human, chimpanzee and macaque genomes and share a very high similarity. Phylogenetic trees show that the GAGE gene family began to duplicate after the split of human and chimpanzee. The estimated ages of the duplication events range from 4 million years ago to the present. The Ka/Ks values between the duplicates are significantly greater than 1, indicating that the mutation rate is higher in coding regions than non-coding regions of the genes, which suggests that the GAGE gene family is under positive selection. These findings indicate that the GAGE gene family may be a newly formed gene family undergoing rapid functional evolution.
Liu
Yang
Y
Laboratory of Molecular Immunology, State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, School of Life Science, Fudan University, Handan Road 220, Shanghai 200433, PR China.
Zhu
Qiyun
Q
Zhu
Naishuo
N
D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D000951:Antigens, Neoplasm / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005718:Gametogenesis / Q000235:genetics; D020440:Gene Duplication; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D005810:Multigene Family / Q000235:genetics*; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000235:genetics; D010802:Phylogeny; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
D000951:Antigens, Neoplasm