Whether patterns of gene duplication and modularity in the aflatoxin gene cluster are further influenced by evolutionary processes in populations that maintain or break down AF gene clusters are unknown and an important area of further research.
With ever-increasing anthropogenic pressure on natural systems, it is vital to understand how the ecosystems we depend upon have been conditioned by evolutionary processes in historical environments which may have been very different from those they experience in the present day, and how any such conditioning may shape these systems' responses to new pressures.
These expansions probably reflect the requirement for flexible and complex intercellular signalling in these multicellular organisms, evidently achieved by distinct evolutionary processes in plants and metazoans.
Indeed, it has been reported that the olfactory sense genes were shaped by different evolutionary processes in rodents and primates [ 16- 18].
These forces were primarily responsible for genome expansion in proteomes (especially in Eukarya) by evolutionary processes including gene shuffling, domain rearrangements, and HGT [ 28, 46].
The patterns of association between maternal or paternal and neonatal phenotype may offer insight into how neonatal characteristics are shaped by evolutionary processes, such as conflicting parental interests in fetal investment and obstetric constraints.
The results offer new insights into the shaping of motif arrangement in promoter sequences by evolutionary processes.
Next, we eliminated introns that were too accelerated or decelerated in some lineages (and that could have been affected by changes in evolutionary processes in particular lineages such as a change of function, a change to a chromosome position with different evolutionary dynamics, alternative splicing, etc).
The region of the genome containing the mating-type locus in M. lychnidis-dioicae has likely been shaped by long-term evolutionary processes, in contrast to fungi suggested to serve as models for the early evolution of sex chromosomes of plants and animals (Fraser and Heitman 2004; Menkis et al. 2008).
Inaccurate portrayals of evolutionary processes in the media, by teachers, and by scientists themselves surely exacerbate the situation (e.g., Jungwirth 1975a, b, 1977; Moore et al. 2002).
By identifying these residual footprints of genomic evolutionary processes in the form of "signatures of selection," we hope to gain valuable insight into the evolutionary past of a species.
