Xuhua Xia (xxia1 at unix1.sncc.lsu.edu) wrote:
>A pesudogene is like a character in a fiction, who is mirrored from
>some persons or animals or objects in the real world, but is not
>constrained by the laws governing the real world.
It's a nice definition, but:
Say you have a gene, and it duplicates---only one functional copy of
the gene is required. At what point does either one of the genes
become a "pseudogene"?
>not really harm those in the real world. In short, a pesudogene is
>often free to take on any nucleotide anywhere anytime in a way that is
>not allowed in a functional gene.
This has two meanings as I see it:
1. There is a restriction imposed by natural selection in such a way
that any organism that incorporates deliterious mutations in
functional gene will die and therefore you never see the mutations on
a functional gene. However, you see them on a pseudogene because
there's no selection pressure.
2. There is something that says you can make mutations in a
pseudogene at will but you can't on a functional gene.
I hope you see the difference. I presume you mean (1) when you say it
is "free to take on any nucleotide"? A functional gene then is ALSO
free to take on any nucleotide, but the organism that takes on a
deleterious change in a functional gene will not survive.
--Ram
me at ram.org || http://www.ram.org || http://www.twisted-helices.com/th
Daddy's lil girl ain't a girl no more.
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