%0 Journal Article
%T Genome-wide detection of hybrid genes with multiple components in human
%A Yun-Huei Tzeng
%A Sheng-Shun Wang
%J BMC Research Notes
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1756-0500-2-75
%X We have developed a method designated Triad Comparison Algorithm (TCA) to detect all potential N-hybrid events (i.e., an N-hybrid gene and its N non-overlapping component regions derived from N different genes) in human genome. The results reveal that there are many convoluted N-hybrid events with multiple components (N > 2) and that the most complicated N-hybrid genes detected in human by TCA are composed of six component regions. Interestingly, our results show that most of the hybrid events belong to the 3-hybrid category. Furthermore, we observe that a single gene might participate in different events. Twelve genes were found to have dual identities contained in different N-hybrid events (i.e., they were identified as hybrid genes as well as component genes). This points out that to a certain extent the gene hybrid mechanism has generated new genes during the course of human genome evolutionary history.An efficient method, TCA, is developed for exploring all candidates of hybrid genes in the human genome and provides useful results for the evolutionary analysis. The advantage of TCA is its power of detecting any kinds of hybrid events in any species with a large genome size.The emergence of new genes is fundamental to the evolution of lineage- or species- specific traits [1]. Duplication of chromosomal segments provides abundant raw material for the formation of new genes [2,3]. In addition to the gene duplications that have been identified in different scales, recent studies demonstrated that the fusion/fission mechanism may also play an important role in enrichment of new genes and/or genes with multiple protein domains in various species [1,4-12]. For example, most of the proteins in SCOP [13] or Pfam [14] databases harbor two or more domains resulted by a wide variety of domain combinations [15,16]. Moreover, multiple functional domains in proteins have been considered as essential units for the modular assembly of new genes [17-21]. It has been shown that g
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/2/75