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Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics Advance Access originally published online on June 23, 2008
Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics 2008 7(3):211-216; doi:10.1093/bfgp/eln022
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics issue: Special Issue: Caenorhabditis elegans: Ten Years After the Genome [View the issue table of contents]

Special Issue Papers

Genome evolution in Caenorhabditis

James H. Thomas

Corresponding author. James H. Thomas, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Tel: +1 206 543 7877; E-mail: jht{at}u.washington.edu

Since the completion of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome sequence 10 years ago, efforts of the large community of C. elegans geneticists have resulted in a high-quality annotation of the structures and sequence relatedness of nearly all the protein encoding and RNA genes. Based on increasingly accurate gene counts in other species, it now appears that C. elegans has more functional genes than most insects and approximately the same number as most mammals. In the last few years, draft genome sequences for several other nematodes have been published (C. briggsae and Brugia malayi) or publicly released (C. remanei, C. brenneri, C. japonica, Pristionchus pacificus, Trichinella spiralis and Haemonchus contortus). Comparisons of gene content within the phylum and to other phyla reveal complex patterns of genome evolution. These patterns include substantial numbers of genes conserved across all the major metazoan phyla (core metazoan genes) and many nematode-specific genes and gene families. Nematode-specific genes are located predominantly on autosomal arms, which also have higher recombination rates. It appears that evolutionary innovations occur mostly in these regions, probably facilitated by higher recombination. Few of these genes have gross phenotypes when knocked down by RNAi, suggesting that many of them function in specific aspects of nematode biology that were not tested, including chemosensation, pathogen response and xenobiotic detoxification.

Keywords: Caenorhabditis, genome, evolution, gene function, population diversity


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