Humanization of Yeast Genes with Multiple Human Orthologs Reveals Functional Divergence Between Paralogs

Reading time: 1 minute

Lab.Equipment has your everyday Biology industry news fix covered. Here is one first published on PLOS Biology:

by Jon M. Laurent, Riddhiman K. Garge, Ashley I. Teufel, Claus O. Wilke, Aashiq H. Kachroo, Edward M. Marcotte

Despite over a billion years of evolutionary divergence, several thousand human genes possess clearly identifiable orthologs in yeast, and many have undergone lineage-specific duplications in one or both lineages. These duplicated genes may have been free to diverge in function since their expansion, and it is unclear how or at what rate ancestral functions are retained or partitioned among co-orthologs between species and within gene families. Thus, in order to investigate how ancestral functions are retained or lost post-duplication, we systematically replaced hundreds of essential yeast genes with their human orthologs from gene families that have undergone lineage-specific duplications, including those with single duplications (1 yeast gene to 2 human genes, 1:2) or higher-order expansions (1:>2) in the human lineage. We observe a variable pattern of replaceability across different ortholog classes, with an obvious trend toward differential replaceability inside gene families, and rarely observe replaceability by all members of a family. We quantify the ability of various properties of the orthologs to predict replaceability, showing that in the case of 1:2 orthologs, replaceability is predicted largely by the divergence and tissue-specific expression of the human co-orthologs, i.e., the human proteins that are less diverged from their yeast counterpart and more ubiquitously expressed across human tissues more often replace their single yeast ortholog. These trends were consistent with in silico simulations demonstrating that when only one ortholog can replace its corresponding yeast equivalent, it tends to be the least diverged of the pair. Replacea... Find the entire article at the PLOS Biology Blog.

If you're in the Bio industry and are searching for top quality Bio equipment for your basic and advanced applications like cultivation or medicine, then you're in the right place. Lab.Equipment provides a range of equipment perfect for Biology laboratories. Shop our highly-recommended Biology products including:

• Lab Stirrers
• Laboratory Balances
• Mixers
• Centrifuges
• Pipettes

Get outstanding products for your application by checking our inventory of products from well-trusted MFGs like:

• Being Instrument
• Radwag
• Hermle
• Ohaus
• AnD Weighing

It's not a problem if you are running other applications. Lab.Equipment has you covered with a collection of high quality lab equipment to enhance your lab productivity. Shop accurate equipment for whatever application here.