Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes

Fundamental traits of genes, including function, length, and GC content, all vary with gene age. Pleiotropy, where a single gene affects multiple traits, arises through selection for novel traits and is expected to be removed from the genome through subfunctionalization following duplication events. It is unclear, however, how these opposing forces shape the prevalence of pleiotropy through time. We hypothesized that the prevalence of pleiotropy would be lowest in young genes, peak in middle-aged genes, and then either decrease to a middling level in ancient genes or stay near the middle-aged peak, depending on the balance between exaptation and subfunctionalization. To address this question, we have calculated gene age and pleiotropic status for several model multicellular eukaryotes, including Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Danio rerio, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Arabidopsis thaliana. Gene age was determined by finding the most distantly related species that sha..., , # Data from: Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.m63xsj4fh](10.5061/dryad.m63xsj4fh)

**Description of the data and file structure**

**Data**

This section contains information about the data that is available in the zipped data file in this Dray entry.

Each file in this folder contains data necessary for recreating the analysis in the published Gene Age Project paper (i.e., the manuscript associated with this entry). Each species folder has species-relevant data and a Python dataframe containing processed information saved as a .pkl file.

Species_data.zip: The zipped \"species_data\" file contains six folders,  one for each species in the paper, and each file contains data that relates strictly to that species. This includes species-relevant information from String, OMAdb, Gene Ontology, Ensembl, and the Open Tree of Life.

Each species has a folder in the species_data.zip folder that follows a similar structure, so her...,