Gene birth contributes to structural disorder encoded by overlapping genes

S. Willis; J. Masel

This unexpected result is stronger for "internal overlaps", in which one gene is completely contained within its overlapping partner (23 +1 events vs. 1 +2 event, p = 3×10 −6 ), and is not found for "terminal overlaps", in which the 5 end of the downstream gene overlaps with the 3 end of the upstream member of the pair (9 +1 events vs. 9 +2 events). (This double-counts a +1 event for which there were three homologous gene pairs, two of which were internal overlaps, and one of which was a terminal overlap.) Following [2] , . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/229690 doi: bioRxiv preprint we interpret the restriction of this finding to internal overlaps as evidence that the cause of the bias applies to complete de novo gene birth, but not to the addition of a sequence to an existing gene.