This represents a major advance in the tools available to study evolutionary questions in L. salmonis, and other caligid copepods in general.
Thus, for example, if 1000 segments (corresponding to ~10% of the genome) were available to harbour evolutionary breakpoints, some 427 would have been expected to be used by 519 breakpoints.
According to our simulations (presented in Additional file 6), this number of breakpoint regions would be expected if only 7 10% of the genome (i.e. 700 1000 of the 0.3 Mb regions) were available to harbour evolutionary breakpoints.
By means of a simulation with 100,000 iterations, we then estimated the proportion of the genome in which these 519 breakpoints would have been expected to occur, by chance alone, given a certain specified number of genomic regions available to harbour evolutionary breakpoints (Additional file 6).
The genetic diversity is one of the most important instruments available to understand our evolutionary history.
As such, there is a limited amount of data available to evaluate the evolutionary history of WGDs within the order.
In his time, however, no molecular techniques were available to study the evolutionary changes of genes, and therefore his conclusions have remained as conjectures.
We examine the transfer of cellulase genes to the free-living and beetle-associated nematode Pristionchus pacificus, for which detailed phylogenetic knowledge is available, to address predictions by evolutionary theory for successful gene transfer.
As a consequence, gene duplication is also an important mechanism for the shaping of complex regulatory networks (which have to "manage" the repertoire of genes available to a genome) during evolutionary growth of a genome.
Developmental processes may limit the spectrum of evolutionary trajectories available to a lineage.
