Xiaoge Liu, Chunfu Xiao, Xinwei Xu, Jie Zhang, Fan Mo, Jia-Yu Chen, Nicholas Delihas, Li Zhang, Ni A An, Chuan-Yun Li
For a long time, it was believed that new genes arise only from modifications of preexisting genes, but the discovery of de novo protein-coding genes that originated from noncoding DNA regions demonstrates the existence of a "motherless" origination process for new genes. However, the features, distributions, expression profiles, and origin modes of these genes in humans seem to support the notion that their origin is not a purely "motherless" process; rather, these genes arise preferentially from genomic regions encoding preexisting precursors with gene-like features...
2024: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. RNA