Genome Evolution Course 2009-2010

www.yanaiweb.com/genome

Itai Yanai, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Tutorial Presentation as PDF or PP.

Problem Set #6 assigned November 29^th, 2009

To be submitted as hard-copy in English or Hebrew on December 6^th, 2009 (at the beginning of class, 9:30am).

Problem 1: The art of evolution. What is the logic behind the argument that duplication of genetic sequences allows for creativity?

Problem 2: What is an animal?  Unique matching: Given that you know that a certain organism has:

a)         A Hox gene cluster and the zootype

b)        Some Homeobox genes

c)         Helix-turn-helix genes

d)        At least four Hox clusters and the zootype

you can be sure that it is ______.

1)        An Eukayote

2)        An Animal

3)        A Vertebrate

4)        A living organism

Problem 3: Molecular archaeology I. Why is the existence of pairs of duplications in the Arabidopsis genome suggestive of a genome duplication instead of successive duplications?

Problem 4: Molecular archaeology II. What is the significance of the observation that 50 of the 55 pairs of duplicates in S. cerevisiae have a conserved orientation with respect to the centromere.

Problem 5: Dating a genome duplication by the tree-based approach. Recent estimates of the divergence of the human lineage from the fly lineage range from 833 to 993 Myr ago. Use the range of dates that are observed with excess duplications to estimate the date of the proposed genome duplication. What is special about this time in the evolution of our lineage?

Note: the suggested readings may be helpful in answering some of the questions.