The evolution of major novel traits -- characteristics such as wings, flowers, flowers, horns or limbs -- has long been known to play a key role in allowing organisms to exploit new opportunities in their surroundings.
What's still up for debate, though is how these imortant augmentations come about from a genetic point of view.
New research from an international team of evolutionary biologists, led by the University of Oxford, has used bacteria to show that acquiring duplicate copies of genes can provide a template allowing organisms to develop new attributes from redundant copies of existing genes.
Gene duplication has been proposed as playing a key role in innovation since the 1970s but these finding add important empirical evidence to support this theory.
The study, which involved collaboration with researchers from the University of Zurich, is published in the journal PLOS Genetics.
The researchers allowed 380 populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria to evolve novel metabolic traits such as the ability to degrade new sugars. This gave the researchers the opportunity to witness evolution happening in real-time.
After 30 days of evolution, they sequenced the genomes of bacteria that had evolved novel metabolic traits. They found that mutations mainly affected genes involved in transcription and metabosim, and that novelty tended to evolve through mutations in pre-existing duplicated genes in the P. aeruginosa genome.
Duplication drives novelty because genetic redundancy provided by duplication allows bacteria to evolve new metabolic functions without compromising existing functions. These findings suggest that past duplication events might be important for future innovations.
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