| Abstract: | Background Gene duplication has been suggested to be an important process in the generation of evolutionary novelty. Neofunctionalization, as an adaptive process where one copy mutates into a function that was not present in the pre-duplication gene, is one mechanism that can lead to the retention of both copies. More recently, subfunctionalization, as a neutral process where the two copies partition the ancestral function, has been proposed as an alternative mechanism driving duplicate gene retention in organisms with small effective population sizes. The relative importance of these two processes is unclear. |
