CIGENE members have contributed to two articles in high impact journals; Nature Genetics and Science.
In the Nature Genetics correspondence “Subfunctionalization versus neofunctionalization after whole-genome duplication”, Simen Sandve is the first author on a comment to two previous papers, both published in 2016. These two studies reached very different conclusions about how duplicated genes in fish contribute to the evolution of new gene regulation and function. One paper suggested that this happens mostly through subfunctionlisation (i.e. distributing original functions between the duplicates) while the other pointed to neofunctionalisation as the main mechanism (one copy keep the original functions, while the other can try out new functions)
To solve these conflicting results, Sandve and his colleagues Torgeir Hvidsten and Rori Rohlfs, re-analysed the results and found that the analysis that suggested subfunctionalization to be most important was biased by an methodological error. This means that regulatory neofunctionalisation seems to be a major route towards evolution of novel regulatory variation in fish.
Simen Sandve also contributed to the Science publication “Shifting the limits in wheat research and breeding using a fully annotated reference genome” together with Professor Odd Arne Olsen and his team from Department of Plant Sciences.
Published 23rd November 2018