The Enrichment of TATA Box and the Scarcity of Depleted Proximal Nucleosome in the Promoters of Duplicated Yeast Genes

Population genetic theory of gene duplication suggests that the preservation of duplicate copies requires functional divergence upon duplication. Genes that can be readily modified to produce new gene expression patterns may thus be duplicated often. In yeast, genes exhibit dichotomous expression patterns based on their promoter architectures. The expression of genes that contain TATA box or occupied proximal nucleosome (OPN) tends to be variable and respond to external signals. On the other hand, genes without TATA box or with depleted proximal nucleosome (DPN) are expressed constitutively. We find that recent duplicates in the yeast genome are heavily biased to be TATA box containing genes and not to be DPN genes. This suggests that variably expressed genes, due to the functional organization in their promoters, have higher duplicability than constitutively expressed genes.