A question of gene duplication

Suppose you have a big house and each item present on the house has a copy. You've got to divide the house into two portions.
Each portion should have the same content. So, what do you do? You give each portion the one of the two pieces of each item. Thats it.



Suppose you , by mistake, put both the pieces of one item on one portion.
So, now the house is not equally divided.

Once a gene has been duplicated in this way., one of the two gene copies is free to mutate and become specialized to perform a different function within the same cell[/QUOTE]

The owners of both the portions have the freedom to change the settings of items in any way.

Re: A question of gene duplication

If the genome duplicates incompletely while the cell divides, you end up with one cell whose genome is incomplete and another cell that has surplus DNA in its chromosomes. The `gene-depleted' cell will likely be infertile, so won't produce any successors for geneticists to study. The cell with the `super-sized' gene, by contrast, may well multiply, and multiply the surplus genes with it.


I cannot directly answer your question about the relationship between the new genes and the old genome, because that involves an apples-to-oranges type of comparison. But there is a meaningful relationship between the new and the old genes. By `family of genes', your text means a set of new genes within a new genome that derives from some old gene within some old genome. `Derived' means that the new genes are copies of copies of (...) of copies of the ancestor old gene. (With incompatible mutations creeping in during the copying process.)