Abstract
We report that the GAGE gene family of human Cancer/testis antigen (CTA) genes is likely to be in an early stage of its evolution. Members of this gene family are tandemly arranged on the X chromosome only in human, chimpanzee and macaque genomes and share a very high similarity. Phylogenetic trees show that the GAGE gene family began to duplicate after the split of human and chimpanzee. The estimated ages of the duplication events range from 4 million years ago to the present. The Ka/Ks values between the duplicates are significantly greater than 1, indicating that the mutation rate is higher in coding regions than non-coding regions of the genes, which suggests that the GAGE gene family is under positive selection. These findings indicate that the GAGE gene family may be a newly formed gene family undergoing rapid functional evolution.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC, No. 30471906 and 30571650). We thank Fuqu Yu, Richard Callahan and Gary Potikyan for critical reading of the manuscript, and Tonghai Dou for helpful discussion.
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Yang Liu and Qiyun Zhu contributed equally to this work.
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Liu, Y., Zhu, Q. & Zhu, N. Recent duplication and positive selection of the GAGE gene family. Genetica 133, 31–35 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-007-9179-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-007-9179-9