Developmental constraint on gene duplicability in fruit flies and nematodes

A previous study in nematodes suggested that developmental constraint reduces the duplicability of genes involved in early development. Recent large-scale gene expression studies of fly development enabled us to conduct a more detailed study of this issue. We found that the average duplicability of genes involved in embryonic development is indeed lower than that of genes involved in larval development but not significantly lower than that of genes involved in later stages of development. Moreover, in both flies and nematodes genes with multiple expression peaks do not seem to have a lower duplicability than do genes with a single expression peak. Thus, although developmental constraint does appear to reduce gene duplicability, the effect seems weak or at best moderate. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.