Revisit on the evolutionary relationship between alternative splicing and gene duplication

Gene duplications and alternative splicing (AS) isoforms are two widespread types of genetic variations that can facilitate diversification of protein function. A number of studies claimed that after gene duplication, two AS isoforms with differential functions can be ‘fixed’, respectively, in each of the duplicate copies. This simple ‘functional-sharing’ hypothesis was recently challenged by Roux and Robinson-Rechavi (2011). Instead, they proposed a more sophisticated hypothesis, invoking that less alternative splicing genes tend to be duplicated more frequently, and single-copy genes are younger than duplicate genes, or the ‘duplicability-age’ hypothesis for short. In this letter, we show that all these genome-wide analyses of AS isoforms actually did not provide clear-cut evidence to nullify the basic idea of functional-sharing hypothesis. After updating our understanding of genome-wide alternative splicing, duplicability and CNV (copy number variation), we argue that the foundation of the duplicability-age hypothesis remains to be justified carefully. Finally, we suggest that a better approach to resolving this controversy is the correspondence analysis of indels (insertions and deletions) between duplicate genes to the genomic exon–intron structure, which can be used to experimentally test the effect of functional-sharing hypothesis.

► The relationship between the AS level and the gene family size is logistic.
► The duplicability-age hypothesis remains to be justified carefully.
► Reduction of AS levels in duplicates insensitive to underlying mechanisms
► Gene structure analysis provides a promising approach to resolve this controversy.