Concerted evolution of multigene families and homoeologous recombination

Abstract

The dynamism of genomes is one of the most thoroughly documented paradigms in the genomic era, envisaged by the cytogenetic school during middle decades of the twentieth century. Such dynamism refers not just to the evolutionary changes that take place across deep time but also to the myriad changes at different levels (from SNPs to large structural rearrangements) that shape and adjust genomes over a smaller time scale. This chapter reviews two of the many forces that provide genome dynamism in plants. These two forces, concerted evolution of multigene families and homoeologous recombination of hybridized genomes, in principle contribute to shape the plant genomes through opposite effects but, in fact, the both represent some of the most important manifestations of non-independent evolution of DNA sequences.