Strong Positive Selection Drives Rapid Diversification of R-Genes in Arabidopsis Relatives

Although plant resistance (R) genes are extremely diverse and evolve rapidly, little is known about the mechanisms that generate this sequence divergence. To investigate these forces, we compared all nucleotide binding sites and leucine-rich repeat R-genes between two closely related species, Arabid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of molecular evolution 2010-02, Vol.70 (2), p.137-148
Main Authors: Chen, Qihan, Han, Zhaoxue, Jiang, Haiyang, Tian, Dacheng, Yang, Sihai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amino Acid Sequence
Animal Genetics and Genomics
Arabidopsis - genetics
Arabidopsis thaliana
Binding sites
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Botany
Cell Biology
Disease Resistance - genetics
Evolutionary Biology
Genes, Plant
Genetic Variation
Genetics
Genome, Plant
Life Sciences
Microbiology
Molecular biology
Oryza - genetics
Phylogeny
Plant Diseases
Plant Genetics and Genomics
Plant resistance
Plant Sciences
Selection, Genetic
Sequence Alignment
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Summary:Although plant resistance (R) genes are extremely diverse and evolve rapidly, little is known about the mechanisms that generate this sequence divergence. To investigate these forces, we compared all nucleotide binding sites and leucine-rich repeat R-genes between two closely related species, Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis lyrata. Our analyses revealed two distinct evolutionary patterns driven by either positive or stabilizing selection. Most R-genes (>50%) were evolving under strong positive selection characterized by high Ka/Ks ratios (>1), frequent recombination, copy number variation, and extremely high sequence divergence between the two species. The stably selected R-genes (
ISSN:0022-2844
1432-1432
DOI:10.1007/s00239-009-9316-4