Search results for "concerted evolution"

Sequence features and evolutionary mechanisms in the chicken avidin gene family

2001

The chicken avidin gene family comprises the avidin gene (avd) and several homologous avidin-related genes (avrs). The sequences of the avr genes are nearly identical to each other but exhibit nonrandomly distributed, frequently nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions compared to avd. In this study, we determined the genetic distances and the phylogeny of the avd and avr genes and found differences between different exons and introns. Our results suggest the involvement of biased gene conversion in the evolution of the genes. Furthermore, one of the genes was identified as a putative fusion gene. The occurrence of both gene conversion and recombination supports the models suggesting a common…