Inferring the recent duplication history of a gene cluster

Abstract

Much important evolutionary activity occurs in gene clusters, where a copy of a gene may be free to evolve new functions. Computational methods to extract evolutionary information from sequence data for such clusters are currently imperfect, in part because accurate sequence data are often lacking in these genomic regions, making the existing methods difficult to apply. We describe a new method for reconstructing the recent evolutionary history of gene clusters. The method's performance is evaluated on simulated data and on actual human gene clusters. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.