Chromodomain Protein, Y Like Protein 2 (CDYL2)

Theories predict that the long-term survival of duplicated genes requires their functional diversification, which can be accomplished by either subfunctionalization or neofunctionalization. This progenitor later duplicated to generate CDYL and CDYL2, two autosomal genes found in all extant mammals. Subfunctionalization is evidenced by the observation that simian CDYL and CDYL2 retained their somatic housekeeping transcripts but lost the spermatogenic transcripts to the newly arisen CDY. Neo-functionalization is suggested by the rapid evolution of the CDY protein sequence. Thus, the CDY-related family offers an instructive example of how duplicated genes undergo functional diversification in both expression profile and protein sequence.