In This Issue

摘要

Many new genes evolve through gene duplication followed by rapid evolution. The rate of the evolutionary process was thought to depend on the interrelationships between a protein's structure and function, and its biological role. Yuri Wolf et al. used a mathematical model to predict the variables that determine the evolutionary rates of change in genes from Drosophila, Aspergillus, and humans. The authors found that the distribution of evolutionary rates was universal, although their model predicted substantial differences between genes of different age classes.