The extinction dynamics of bacterial pseudogenes

Pseudogenes are usually considered to be completely neutral sequences whose evolution is shaped by random mutations and chance events. It is possible, however, for disrupted genes to generate products that are deleterious due either to the energetic costs of their transcription and translation or to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS genetics 2010-08, Vol.6 (8), p.e1001050
Main Authors: Kuo, Chih-Horng, Ochman, Howard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bacteria
Bacteriology
Evolution
Evolutionary Biology/Evolutionary and Comparative Genetics
Evolutionary Biology/Genomics
Evolutionary Biology/Microbial Evolution and Genomics
Gene Deletion
Gene mutations
Genes
Genetic aspects
Genetics and Genomics/Microbial Evolution and Genomics
Genetics and Genomics/Population Genetics
Genome, Bacterial
Genomes
Microbiology
Molecular Sequence Data
Mutation
Phylogeny
Physiological aspects
Pseudogenes
Salmonella
Salmonella - classification
Salmonella - genetics
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Summary:Pseudogenes are usually considered to be completely neutral sequences whose evolution is shaped by random mutations and chance events. It is possible, however, for disrupted genes to generate products that are deleterious due either to the energetic costs of their transcription and translation or to the formation of toxic proteins. We found that after their initial formation, the youngest pseudogenes in Salmonella genomes have a very high likelihood of being removed by deletional processes and are eliminated too rapidly to be governed by a strictly neutral model of stochastic loss. Those few highly degraded pseudogenes that have persisted in Salmonella genomes correspond to genes with low expression levels and low connectivity in gene networks, such that their inactivation and any initial deleterious effects associated with their inactivation are buffered. Although pseudogenes have long been considered the paradigm of neutral evolution, the distribution of pseudogenes among Salmonella strains indicates that removal of many of these apparently functionless regions is attributable to positive selection.
ISSN:1553-7404
1553-7390
1553-7404
DOI:10.1371/journal.pgen.1001050