Convergent evolution of polyploid genomes from across the eukaryotic tree of life

By modeling the homoeologous gene losses that occurred in fifty genomes deriving from ten distinct polyploidy events, we show that the evolutionary forces acting on polyploids are remarkably similar, regardless of whether they occur in flowering plants, ciliates, fishes or yeasts. We show that many of the events show a relative rate of duplicate gene loss prior to the first post-polyploidy speciation that is significantly higher than in later phases of their evolution. The relatively weak selective constraint experienced by the single-copy genes these losses produced leads us to suggest that most of the purely selectively neutral duplicate gene losses occur in the immediate post-polyploid period. Nearly all of the events show strong evidence of biases in the duplicate losses, consistent with them being allopolyploidies, with two distinct progenitors contributing to the modern species. We also find ongoing and extensive reciprocal gene losses (RGL; alternative losses of duplicated ancestral genes) between these genomes. With the exception of a handful of closely related taxa, all of these polyploid organisms are separated from each other by tens to thousands of reciprocal gene losses. As a result, it is very unlikely that viable diploid hybrid species could form between these taxa, since matings between such hybrids would tend to produce offspring lacking essential genes. It is therefore possible that the relatively high frequency of recurrent polyploidies in some lineages may be due to the ability of new polyploidies to bypass RGL barriers.