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.
Laboratory of Molecular Immunology, State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, School of Life Science, Fudan University, Handan Road 220, Shanghai 200433, PR China.
Yang
Y
Liu
Qiyun
Q
Zhu
Naishuo
N
Zhu
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