In situ dissecting the evolution of gene duplication with different histone modification patterns based on high-throughput data analysis in Arabidopsis thaliana.

This study showed that duplicate genes in Arabidopsis have a more similar HM pattern than single-copy genes in both their promoters and protein-coding regions. The evolution of HM marks is found to be coupled with coding sequence divergence and expression divergence after gene duplication. We found that functionally selective constraints may impose on epigenetic evolution after gene duplication. Furthermore, duplicate genes with distinct functions have more divergence in histone modification compared with the ones with the same function, while higher expression divergence is found with mutations of chromatin modifiers. This study shows the role of epigenetic marks in regulating gene expression and functional divergence after gene duplication in plants based on sequencing data.