Understanding the evolution of genome complexity is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. For over thirty years, gene duplication has been recognized as the major mechanism generating raw material for the evolution of complex genomes. This project is designed to test a new model that suggests that dominant negative phenotypes prevent the fixation of missense mutations in newly duplicated genes, thereby extending their survival and enabling the functional evolution of new gene copies. The model will be tested in the ribosomal protein gene family and will reconstruct the comprehensive evolutionary history of ribosomal protein genes in eight mammalian genomes, will test key predictions of the model through the in vivo functional analysis, and will test a collection discrete evolutionary predictions using computational analysis of known mammalian duplicates.
Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this work will be manifest in the translation of genetic concepts to K-8 classrooms, adaptation of computational biology workshops for high-school students, and mentored undergraduate research through the Northeast Alliance Summer Research Program for Underrepresented Minorities and the University of Connecticut Honors Program. These outreach initiatives will provide lesson plans that can be used by teachers across the country and will bring science to students at critical and formative times in their academic development and will help attract young students, underrepresented minorities and women to careers in science. In addition, the proposed research project will provide excellent multi-disciplinary research training opportunities in computational and experimental biology for undergraduate and graduate students.
