Exon duplication from a fork head to a homeodomain protein

The evolution of complex organisms such as animals requires a large expansion of the number of genes controlling developmental events. In addition, it is thought that domains are shuffled between genes to further increase the complexity and generate new types of genes and functions. Working with the Caenorhabditis elegans homeobox gene ceh-43, the orthologue of fly Distal-less (Dll), we observed sequence similarity to the C. elegans gene fkh-1. Now, with the complete genomic sequence available, we examined this similarity in detail. The region of similarity is confined essentially to one exon in the carboxy terminus of the two genes. Based on the gene structure, we think that an exon of fkh-1 was duplicated to the carboxy terminus of ceh-43, where it was incorporated as the last exon. This duplication event seems to have happened recently since the similarity on the nucleotide level is higher than the sequence similarity between fkh-1 of C. elegans and C. briggsae. Potentially the duplication event was mediated via a short region of sequence similarity between the two open reading frames of the genes. This duplication event clear shows that a part of a gene can successfully be juxtaposed to another gene. These events may perhaps not be rare. Received: 28 March 1999 / Accepted: 8 June 1999