Genetic paralog analysis and simulations

Abstract

Using Monte Carlo methods, we simulated the effects of bias in generation and elimination of paralogs on the size distribution of paralog groups. It was found that the function describing the decay of the number of paralog groups with their size depends on the ratio between the probability of duplications of genes and their deletions, which corresponds to different selection pressures on the genome size. Slightly different slopes of curves describing the decay of the number of paralog groups with their size were also observed when the threshold of homology between paralogous sequences was changed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.