1 November 2025
Min-Yao Jhu, Fabian van Beveren, Bruno Guillotin - The Plant Cell, 2025
Gene and genome duplications are fundamental forces driving plant evolution, leading to relaxed selection and expanding genetic toolkits (Van de Peer et al. 2017; Almeida-Silva and Van de Peer 2023). However, the subsequent fate of these duplicates—whether they retain redundant functions, divide tasks (subfunctionalization), or acquire new roles (neofunctionalization)—largely depends on how they originated (Birchler and Yang 2022). While previous evolutionary studies relied primarily on bulk RNA sequencing, which aggregates expression profiles across entire tissues, recent research published by Almeida-Silva and Van de Peer uses spatial transcriptomics across 5 diverse plant species (Arabidopsis thaliana, soybean, orchid, maize, and barley) to reveal the evolution of gene expression divergence at the cell-type level (Figure A). This provides a spatially resolved view of how the mode of duplication impacts the expression of duplicated genes across angiosperms.
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