Genome Duplication (polyploidy) Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble

Recommendable, but a very long article!

"... Scientists suspect that an organism inheriting three, four, or more sets of chromosomes instead of two (a condition called polyploidy) is, in most cases, a fatal error of cell division. Only a tiny fraction of whole-genome duplication events are thought to stabilize in a lineage. But those that do can have significant consequences.

Emerging studies ... are revealing that genome duplication can be a dramatic, if risky, injection of genetic novelty that fuels evolutionary innovation. It’s “a cheap and easy way to generate a bunch of heritable variation that can be then quickly repurposed for new stuff,”  ... who has watched yeast double its genome in his long-term experiments on multicellularity ... 

Spiders’ silk-spinning organs

vertebrates’ large and complex brains

species radiations of legumes, grasses, and 

brassicas (including broccoli and kale); and the tomato plant’s fleshy fruit

all of these evolutionary inventions, and more, were made possible by genome duplication events. ...

Advances in whole-genome sequencing are changing that. Studies across the tree of life are finding that genome duplication isn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence.

Among plants, it’s hard to avoid ...: All seed plants living today have experienced at least one ancient whole-genome duplication, and many have undergone more. Barnacles, insects, trout, and arachnids carry evidence of ancient duplications in their genomes.

Biologists hotly debate whether the significant evolutionary changes that led to jawed vertebrates, from hagfish to humans, are connected by ancient gene duplications hundreds of millions of years ago. ...

evidence of a past genome duplication event alongside indications that the cells were in the process of pruning back excess DNA. ... 1997 Nature paper on the subject helped turn increasing attention to both polyploidy and the inverse process, rediploidization, in which an organism retains some of its doubled genes and discards others, ultimately bringing the genome back to a streamlined diploid state. ..."

Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble | Quanta Magazine "By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the high-risk, high-reward evolutionary event."