Category Archives: de novo gene evolution

Our group is participating in the SMBE Satellite Meeting on de novo gene birth

Cova Vara and Chris Papadopoulos have presented their research in this week’s Symposium on de novo genes celebrated in Texas A&M University (College Station, Nov 6-9 2023). The research aims to explore the evolution of new genes in populations and … Continue reading

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Evolutionary trajectories of new duplicated and putative de novo genes

Completely new protein sequences in genomes can arise by gene duplication or de novo. How does the mechanism of origination influence the fate of the proteins? Do duplicated proteins tend to be retained at higher rates than de novo proteins? … Continue reading

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The functions of human de novo originated proteins start to be revealed

Proteins restricted to a given species or lineage are mysterious. Many of them have emerged de novo from ancestral non-coding genomic regions rather than from pre-existing genes. A new study by Vakirlis et al. shows that a large portion of … Continue reading

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ERC Advanced Grant NovoGenePop

Our ERC Advanced Grant NovoGenePop has just started! This means we can already recruits scientists and start to gather data. The project will investigate how new genes arise in closely related species and populations. This will involve the development of … Continue reading

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Large scale annotation of small proteins by ribosome profiling

We participate in a a new world-wide initiative for the large-scale annotation of small ORF translation events detected by ribosome profiling in the human genome. The initiative, led by researchers at Ensembl, Max Delbrück Center and Broad Institute, among others, … Continue reading

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Our research on de novo genes featured in Nature News

Research on de novo genes has been the subject of a News Feature in Nature, written by Adam Levy. The article presents the case of the arctic cod; comparison of genomic sequences from closely related fish species has shown that … Continue reading

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Thousands of small ORFs are translated, what are they doing?

The high throughput sequencing of ribosome-protected RNA fragments, or ribosome profiling (Ribo-Seq), has uncovered the translation of thousands of novel small ORFs (< 100 amino acids) that were not annotated. These ORFs had remained hidden from annotation pipelines because of … Continue reading

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New genes and functional innovation in mammals

Many human genes have counterparts in distant species such as plants or bacteria. This is because they share a common origin, they were invented a long time ago in a primitive cell. However, there are some genes that do not … Continue reading

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Our group portrayed at El.lipse

Nov 2016 Tweet

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Filed under de novo gene evolution, differential gene expression, science, society

When we fail to detect homologues in other species, is it because they are too divergent or because they do not exist?

The increasing number of genomes available has made it possible to compare the genes and determine in which branch of the phylogenetic tree they are likely to have originated. This has led to the identification of many genes that are … Continue reading

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