BMC Biology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Three rounds (1R/2R/3R) of genome duplications and the evolution of the glycolytic pathway in vertebrates Dirk Steinke†1,3, Simone Hoegg†1, Henner Brinkmann2 and Axel Meyer*1 Address: 1Lehrstuhl für Evolutionsbiologie und Zoologie, Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany, 2Département de biochimie. Université de Montreal, Montreal, QC, H3C3J7, Canada and 3Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada Email: Dirk Steinke -
[email protected]; Simone Hoegg -
[email protected]; Henner Brinkmann -
[email protected]; Axel Meyer* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author †Equal contributors Published: 06 June 2006 Received: 03 February 2006 Accepted: 06 June 2006 BMC Biology 2006, 4:16 doi:10.1186/1741-7007-4-16 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/4/16 © 2006 Steinke et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Evolution of the deuterostome lineage was accompanied by an increase in systematic complexity especially with regard to highly specialized tissues and organs. Based on the observation of an increased number of paralogous genes in vertebrates compared with invertebrates, two entire genome duplications (2R) were proposed during the early evolution of vertebrates. Most glycolytic enzymes occur as several copies in vertebrate genomes, which are specifically expressed in certain tissues.