A-G.54: Microsynteny and functional relatedness: insights into eukaryotic genome evolution
Genome rearrangements have shaped eukaryotic evolution, resulting in extensive variation in genome organization and limited conservation of gene order across distant species. While prokaryotic operons and eukaryotic gene clusters suggest that neighboring genes are often functionally related, the relationship between gene function and gene order conservation (microsynteny) remains poorly understood in eukaryotes.
Here, we investigate the evolutionary conservation of gene microsynteny and its association with functional similarity across a diverse set of eukaryotic genomes. Using Gene Ontology (GO) similarity measures, we show that adjacent genes are significantly more functionally related than expected by chance. Leveraging the unprecedented wealth of publicly available genomes and edgeHOG, a method for reconstructing gene order across the eukaryotic tree of life, we systematically quantify the conservation of gene adjacencies in both extant and ancestral genomes. This enables us to date the emergence of conserved adjacencies and assess how their evolutionary conservation relates to functional coupling between genes.
We further examine the influence of intergenic distance and transcriptional orientation,and explore the role of gene expression and regulatory elements in gene order conservation. Our work contributes to better understanding general trends in eukaryotic genome organization, providing more insights into the subtle interplay between genome rearrangements and gene function.
Co-authors: Alex Warwick Vesztrocy, Natasha Glover, Christophe Dessimoz
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