Evolutionary transients in the rice transcriptome.

Abstract

The number of protein-coding genes predicted from the rice genome remains much larger than the number of genes for Arabidopsis. Most of the excess rice genes show low similarity to Arabidopsis, and eudicots in general. It is difficult to repudiate these genes because even for the 19,079 non-redundant rice cDNAs that have been sequenced, 34.3% are low similarity. Here, we describe a major contributor to this excess of low similarity genes: the frequent and continued occurrence of gene duplications in plants, and the post- duplicative degradation (i.e. relaxed selection) that is typically expected to occur in one of the two gene copies. The salient feature of this degradation is an increase in Ka/Ks for Ks per available site, respectively. We show that low similarity genes are expressed at lower mRNA and protein levels than other genes, and that regions of the encoded proteins are structurally disordered. Indeed, many are evolutionary “transients” that may be destined to die, even if they remain transcriptionally active for millions of years.