Protein subcellular relocalization increases the retention of eukaryotic duplicate genes.

Gene duplication is widely accepted as a key evolutionary process, leading to new genes and novel protein functions. By providing the raw genetic material necessary for functional expansion, the mechanisms that involve the retention and functional diversification of duplicate genes are one of the central topics in evolutionary and comparative genomics. One proposed source of retention and functional diversification is protein subcellular relocalization (PSR). PSR postulates that changes in the subcellular location of eukaryotic duplicate proteins can positively modify function and therefore be beneficial to the organism. As such, PSR would promote retention of those relocalized duplicates and result in significantly lower death rates compared with death rates of nonrelocalized duplicate pairs. We surveyed both relocalized and nonrelocalized duplicate proteins from the available genomes and proteomes of 59 eukaryotic species and compared their relative death rates over a Ks range between 0 and 1. Using the Cox proportional hazard model, we observed that the death rates of relocalized duplicate pairs were significantly lower than the death rates of the duplicates without relocalization in most eukaryotic species examined in this study. These observations suggest that PSR significantly increases retention of duplicate genes and that it plays an important, but currently underappreciated, role in the evolution of eukaryotic genomes.