Genomics and molecular evolution:

Knowledge of the complete genomic sequences of organisms provides an invaluable starting point towards an understanding of the organization and evolution of genomes. This information provides the raw data that enables the study of genomes as an interrelated self-organized collective as opposed to a mere set of individual genes. In a recent study, we constructed a simple evolutionary model based on random gene duplications with increasing modifications that successfully recover the gene family distributions in 21 microbial complete genomes. Furthermore, our model is predictive, i.e. based only on the total number of genes in a genome we can estimate the distribution of gene families in the genome. [See Related Articles]