Resolving noise-control conflict by gene duplication

Abstract

Gene duplication promotes adaptive evolution in two principle ways: allowing one duplicate to evolve a new function and resolving adaptive conflicts by splitting ancestral functions between the duplicates. In an apparent departure from both scenarios, low-expressing transcription factor (TF) duplicates commonly regulate similar sets of genes and act in overlapping conditions. To examine for possible benefits of such apparently redundant duplicates, we examined the budding yeast duplicated stress regulators Msn2 and Msn4. We show that Msn2,4 indeed function as one unit, inducing the same set of target genes in overlapping conditions, yet this two-factor composition allows its expression to be both environmental-responsive and with low-noise, thereby resolving an adaptive conflict that inherently limits expression of single genes. Our study exemplified a new model for evolution by gene duplication whereby duplicates provide adaptive benefit through cooperation, rather than functional divergence: attaining two-factor dynamics with beneficial properties that cannot be achieved by a single gene.