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PARSING OLD GENES. "One of the primary goals of our work on gene duplication is to explain the shortcomings of the classical model, which postulates that the usual fate of a duplicated gene is either conversion to a nonfunctional pseudogene or acquisition of a new function. We believe that duplicate genes are frequently preserved through a partitioning of functions of ancestral genes (subfunctionalization), rather than by the evolution of new functions." https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY AND POPULATION SIZE. "Using population-genetic principles as a guide to understanding the evolution of duplicate genes, introns, mobile-genetic elements, and regulatory-region complexity, our work is advancing the hypothesis that much of eukaryotic genome complexity initially evolved as a passive indirect response to reduced population size (relative to the situation in prokaryotes)." https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY. "It is commonly assumed that a causal link exists between complexity at the genomic and organismal levels." https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

QUESTION 2. "Does polyploidy cause consistent, predictable changes in species interactions vs. the evolution of idiosyncratic differences?" https://lnkd.in/bCmw3Fr View in LinkedIn

PURIFYING POPULATIONS. "It is important to keep in mind population size when thinking about whether deleterious mutations are subjected to purifying selection. It is also important to realize that the “effective” population size is dependent on many factors and is typically much lower than the total number of individuals in a species." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

QUESTION 1. "Does polyploidy directly cause the formation of novel interactions not experienced by diploids, or does it create an opportunity for natural selection to then form novel interactions?" https://lnkd.in/bCmw3Fr View in LinkedIn

POPULATION SIZE. "How various evolutionary forces shape eukaryotic genes and genomes: alleles that were slightly beneficial or deleterious behaved like neutral alleles, provided that the absolute value of their selection coefficient was smaller than the inverse of the “effective” population size." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

RANGE OF IMPACTS. "Here we reviewed the available evidence for how polyploidy may impact many types of species interactions that range from mutualism to antagonism." https://lnkd.in/bCmw3Fr View in LinkedIn

GENETIC DRIFT. "We are promoting the idea that the power of random genetic drift imposes a lower bound to the degree to which natural selection can reduce the mutation rate. This drift-barrier hypothesis seems to support a number of previously disconnected observations, including the increase in the mutation rate with reductions in effective population size, the magnified error rates associated with DNA polymerases and repair enzymes used only infrequently in replication, and the extraordinarily high rates of base misincorporation into transcripts." (Michael Lynch). https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

KNOCK-ON EFFECTS OF PLOIDY. "Polyploidy is a common mode of speciation that can have far-reaching consequences for plant ecology and evolution. Because polyploidy can induce an array of phenotypic changes, there can be cascading effects on interactions with other species. These interactions, in turn, can have reciprocal effects on polyploid plants, potentially impacting their establishment and persistence." https://lnkd.in/bCmw3Fr View in LinkedIn