Question

1) Please provide an example of a gene whose coding sequence is responsible for functional differences between species.

2) Are pleiotropic side-effects believed to be more common for cis-regulatory or structural mutations?

Answer 1

Ans 1) The same gene can perform different functions in different species due to changes in the coding sequence or slight mutation. One example can be the gene for the eye color and due to presence of different coding sequence it leads to formation of different eye color. The eye color of a person is determined by different variation is the coding of the gene. The color of the eye is sort of dependent on the production, storage and transport of the melanin where brown eyes have more melanin content and blue eyes have less pigments. In humans, the gene for the eye color is present on chromosome 15.

Ans 5) The pleiotropy side effects are considered to be more of due to the prevalence and the presence of the cis-regulatory changes. The pleiotrophic changes are considered to be highly deleterious due to massive change in the coding sequence. When we talk about pleiotropy, it is basically when the gene products interact with many proteins or is able to catalyze the occurrence of many reactions simultaneously.