Evolution of Arabidopsis microRNA families through duplication events
Arabidopsis- 1 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA;
- 2 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA;
- 3 United States Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service (USDA–ARS) North Atlantic Area (NAA) Plant, Soil & Nutrition Laboratory Research Unit, Ithaca, New York 15853, USA
Abstract
Recently there has been a great interest in the identification of microRNAs and their targets as well as understanding the spatial and temporal regulation of microRNA genes. To understand how microRNA genes evolve, we looked at several rapidly evolving families in Arabidopsis thaliana, and found that they arose from a process of genome-wide duplication, tandem duplication, and segmental duplication followed by dispersal and diversification, similar to the processes that drive the evolution of protein gene families. Using multiple expression data sets to examine the transcription patterns of different members of the microRNA families, we find the sequence diversification of duplicated microRNA genes to be accompanied by a change in spatial and temporal expression patterns, suggesting that duplicated copies acquire new functionality as they evolve.
Footnotes
- 4
↵4 Corresponding author.
↵4 E-mail maher{at}cshl.edu; fax (516) 367-6851.
-
[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org.]
-
Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.4680506
-
- Received September 22, 2005.
- Accepted December 29, 2005.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
