Organismal complexity, protein complexity, and gene duplicability

Although the evolutionary significance of gene duplication has long been recognized, it remains unclear what determines gene duplicability. We find protein complexity to be an important determinant because the proportion of unduplicated genes (P) increases with the number of subunits in a protein. However, P is high (greater than or equal to65%) for both monomers and multimers in yeast, but less than or equal to30% in human except for subunits of large multimers, implying that organismal complexity is a stronger determinant of gene duplicability than protein complexity. The same conclusion is reached from a comparison of family sizes in yeast and human.