When a gene "fails" (ie doesn't express optimally or at all), does another gene take its place (in a failover capacity) and express adequately enough to keep the bio-system going?

Question

[deontaepharr]

I'm interested in studying the gene interactions, where I can identify genes that work together to produce a function. But if a gene was to stop expressing adequately, I'm interested in knowing if another gene that co-expresses with it will pick up the slack (in a sense) so that the function they are producing will still be there.

What is this phenomena called? If you have papers and other resources that speak on this, please send me those. Thank you!!

[benformatics]

This post does not fit the theme of this forum.

[ATpoint]

Redundancy between genes, for example transcription factors are commonly observed. I will not dig out references now but you can for example search for work of the Rothenberg lab on the redundancy of Runx proteins in T cell development or redundancy of ETS and AP-1 factors in myelopoiesis and inflammation regulation. There is lots of literature on that.

Answer 1

[Asaf]

These interactions are called aggravating and alleviating, the early works (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg2085) started by knocking out pairs of genes in yeast and observing the fitness of the double mutant compared to the expected fitness predicted by the sum of the single mutants. Indeed, a lot of genes don't affect fitness unless another gene is also knocked out, meaning they have compensating traits. There are a lot of papers in this small field with a lot of variations to the simple experiments, some involve gene expression, predict complexes and regulatory networks etc. (I'm actually a co-author on such a paper in E. coli)