Maximal sequence length of exact match between members from a gene family during early evolution

Mutation (substitution, deletion, insertion, etc.) in nucleotide acid causes the maximal sequence lengths of exact match (MALE) between paralogous members from a duplicate event to become shorter during evolution. In this work, MALE changes between members of 26 gene families from four representative species (Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa, Mus mus- culus and Homo sapiens) were investigated. Comparative study of paralogous’ MALE and amino acid substitution rate (dA<0.5) indicated that a close relationship existed between them. The results suggested that MALE could be a sound evolutionary scale for the divergent time for paralogous genes during their early evolution. A reference table between MALE and divergent time for the four species was set up, which would be useful widely, for large-scale genome alignment and comparison. As an example, de- tection of large-scale duplication events of rice genome based on the table was illustrated.