title: Structural vs. functional mechanisms of duplicate gene loss following whole genome doubling.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The loss of duplicate genes - fractionation - after whole genome doubling (WGD) is the subject to a debate as to whether it proceeds gene by gene or through deletion of multi-gene chromosomal segments.
  
  
  RESULTS
  WGD produces two copies of every chromosome, namely two identical copies of a sequence of genes. We assume deletion events excise a geometrically distributed number of consecutive genes with mean µ ≥ 1, and these events can combine to produce single-copy runs of length l. If µ = 1, the process is gene-by-gene. If µ > 1, the process at least occasionally excises more than one gene at a time. In the latter case if deletions overlap, the later one simply extends the existing run of single-copy genes. We explore aspects of the predicted distribution of the lengths of single-copy regions analytically, but resort to simulations to show how observing run lengths l allows us to discriminate between the two hypotheses.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Deletion run length distributions can discriminate between gene-by-gene fractionation and deletion of segments of geometrically distributed length, even if µ is only slightly larger than 1, as long as the genome is large enough and fractionation has not proceeded too far towards completion.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sankoff
authors.forename: Chunfang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Baoyong
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Abad Najar
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D017353:Gene Deletion; D018628:Gene Dosage; D020440:Gene Duplication; D020131:Genes, Duplicate; D016678:Genome