Role of duplicate genes in robustness against deleterious human mutations

It is now widely recognized that robustness is an inherent property of biological systems [ 1,2,3]. The contribution of close sequence homologs to genetic robustness against null mutations has been previously demonstrated in simple organisms [ 4,5]. In this paper we investigate in detail the contribution of gene duplicates to back-up against deleterious human mutations. Our analysis demonstrates that the functional compensation by close homologs may play an important role in human genetic disease. Genes with a 90% sequence identity homolog are about 3 times less likely to harbor known disease mutations compared to genes with remote homologs. Moreover, close duplicates affect the phenotypic consequences of deleterious mutations by making a decrease in life expectancy significantly less likely. We also demonstrate that similarity of expression profiles across tissues significantly increases the likelihood of functional compensation by homologs.