Charlie Bell wrote:
On 24/11/2006, at 12:05 PM, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro wrote:
...
My point was that the "huge" number of duplications or n-plications
of genes would turn the chromossomes into a mess. AFAIK, just one
duplicated gene in the middle of it would make things complicated.
Not really, development is far more robust than that and it somehow
seems to sort itself out a lot more than you'd think. You can chop an
awful lot of DNA about before causing real problems. It's sort of like
...
Charlie
Charlie--
What I thought Alberto was getting at was "how do the
maternal and paternal chromosomes fit together?"
Here's my picture of the problem, where the two parents
have different numbers of copies of gene 'B':
...ABBBCDE... (Maternal)
...ABBBBBCDE... (Paternal)
Won't the A,C,D and E genes pair up, leaving an isolated
loop of extra Bs in one of the child's chromosomes?
Continuing, I guess the answer is "sometimes that's not
a big deal, the extra Bs can be tucked safely out of the
way". But this might explain why only some genes have
multiple copies--sometimes having different copy numbers
would be bad.
---David
Two Bs or not two Bs...Sorry! Maru.
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