Age estimates of duplications: FGFR Paralogon
The branching order within the phylogenetic tree was used to estimate the time window of gene duplication events relative to the divergence of major taxa of organisms. This method of relative dating does not rely on the assumption of a constant rate of evolution. Therefore the process is sensitive to the varying rate of evolution in different branches of the tree (Hughes 1998).
For 80 multigene families (in total 539 human genes) residing on FGFR bearing paralogon (Hsa 4/5/8/10), gene duplication events were estimated by the branching order of respective gene families. Thorough and robust analysis identified a total of 204 duplication events before vertebrate-invertebrate split and 291 duplications were detected after vertebrate-invertebrate and before tetrapod-bony fish divergence. Only 17 tetrapod specific duplication events and 102 fish lineage specific duplications were detected (Ajmal et al., 2014; Hafeez et al., 2016) (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The relative timing of duplication events that expanded the multigene families residing on human FGFR paralogon.
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