My research mainly focused on the functional redundancy and expression divergence of gene duplicates to address currently unsolved problems. Herein, we employed a method based on GO terms to measure functional overlap between paralogs. We established that functional similarity between duplicate genes is the key determinant of their backup capacity. Later, we also investigated expression divergence. Recent studies suggest that only a small proportion of expression variation can be explained by transcriptional variation between paralogs. Here, the contribution from diverged TF-regulations was re-examined and differential promoter chromatin status was also found as an important contributor to expression divergence. To better understand the role of gene duplication in great detail, a case study was performed on the yeast chaperone system, which includes many gene duplicates. Taken together, this study sheds light on the roles of redundancy and divergence in long-term retention of gene duplicates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/25531 |
| Date | 31 December 2010 |
| Creators | Yuan, Zineng |
| Contributors | Zhang, Zhaolei |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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