Mammalian Overlapping Genes: The Comparative Perspective
- Vamsi Veeramachaneni1,2,
- Wojciech Makalowski1,2,
- Michal Galdzicki4,
- Raman Sood4, and
- Izabela Makalowska2,3,5
- 1 Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics
- 2 Department of Biology
- 3 The HuckInstitute of the Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, State College, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
- 4 National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA
Abstract
It is believed that 3.2 billion bp of the human genome harbor ∼35,000 protein-coding genes. On average, one could expect one gene per 300,000 nucleotides (nt). Although the distribution of the genes in the human genome is not random,it is rather surprising that a large number of genes overlap in the mammalian genomes. Thousands of overlapping genes were recently identified in the human and mouse genomes. However,the origin and evolution of overlapping genes are still unknown. We identified 1316 pairs of overlapping genes in humans and mice and studied their evolutionary patterns. It appears that these genes do not demonstrate greater than usual conservation. Studies of the gene structure and overlap pattern showed that only a small fraction of analyzed genes preserved exactly the same pattern in both organisms.
Footnotes
[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org and http://posnania.cbio.psu.edu/research/overlapping_genes.html.]
Article and publication are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.1590904.
↵5 Corresponding author. E-MAIL izabelam{at}psu.edu; FAX (814) 863-1357.
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- Accepted November 25, 2003.
- Received May 26, 2003.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
