Page "Pseudogene" Paragraph 8

# Non-processed ( or duplicated ) pseudogenes.

Gene duplication is another common and important process in the evolution of genomes.

A copy of a functional gene may arise as a result of a gene duplication event and subsequently acquire mutations that cause it to become nonfunctional.

Duplicated pseudogenes usually have all the same characteristics of genes, including an intact exon-intron structure and promoter sequences.

The loss of a duplicated gene's functionality usually has little effect on an organism's fitness, since an intact functional copy still exists.

According to some evolutionary models, shared duplicated pseudogenes indicate the evolutionary relatedness of humans and the other primates.

If Pseudogenization it is due to gene duplication, it usually occurs in the first few million years after the gene duplication provided the gene is not been subjected to any selection pressure.

The functional redundancy will be generated by gene duplication and mostly it is of course not advantageous to carry two identical genes, and mutations that disrupts either structure or function of any one of the two genes are not deleterious and will not be removed through selection process.

As a result, that gene that has been mutated gradually becomes a pseudogene and will be either unexpressed or functionless.

This kind of evolutionary fate is shown by population genetic modeling and also by genome analysis.

These pseudogenes according to evolutionary context will either be deleted or become so distinct from the parental genes so that they will be no more identifiable.

Relatively young pseudogenes can be recognizable due to their sequence similarity.