ArticleGenome biology and evolution2009
Deletional bias across the three domains of life.
Article in Genome biology and evolution, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 140 papers.
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140 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The evolution of the plastid genomes in the holoparasitic Balanophoraceae.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Structure and Content in Closely Related E. coli Genomes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Genome Streamlining: Effect of Mutation Rate and Population Size on Genome Size Reduction.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Single-character insertion-deletion model preserves long indels in ancestral sequence reconstruction.BMC bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Principles of Molecular Evolution: Concepts from Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics for the Multilevel Theory of Learning.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
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80 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Elevated levels of genetic drift are hypothesized to be a dominant factor that influences genome size evolution across all life-forms. However, increased levels of drift appear to be correlated with genome expansion in eukaryotes but with genome contraction in bacteria, suggesting that these two groups of organisms experience vastly different mutational inputs and selective constraints. To determine the contribution of small insertion and deletion events to the differences in genome organization between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, we systematically surveyed 17 taxonomic groups across the three domains of life. Based on over 5,000 indel events in noncoding regions, we found that deletional events outnumbered insertions in all groups examined. The extent of deletional bias, when measured by the total length of insertions to deletions, revealed a marked disparity between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, whereas the ratio was close to one in the three eukaryotic groups examined, deletions outweighed insertions by at least a factor of 10 in most prokaryotes. Moreover, the strength of deletional bias is associated with the proportion of coding regions in prokaryotic genomes. Considering that genetic drift is a stochastic process and does not discriminate the exact nature of mutations, the degree of bias toward deletions provides an explanation to the differential responses of eukaryotes and prokaryotes to elevated levels of drift. Furthermore, deletional bias, rather than natural selection, is the primary mechanism by which the compact gene packing within most prokaryotic genomes is maintained.
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