Plants are under strong evolutionary pressure in developing new and noble R genes to recognize pathogen avirulence (avr) determinants and bring about stable defense for generation after generations. Duplication, sequence variation by mutation, disparity in the length and structure of leucine rich repeats etc., causes tremendous variations within and among R genes in a plant thereby developing diverse recognitional specificity suitable enough for defense against new pathogens. Recent studies on genome sequencing, diversity and population genetics in different plants have thrown new insights on the molecular evolution of these genes. Tandem and segmental duplication are important factors in R gene abundance as inferred from the distribution of major nucleotide binding site-leucine rich repeats (NBS-LRRs) type R-genes in plant genomes. Likewise, R-gene evolution is also thought to be facilitated by cluster formation thereby causing recombination and sequence exchange and resulting in haplotypic diversity. Population studies have further proven that balancing selection is responsible for the maintenance of allelic diversity in R genes. In this review, we emphasize and discuss on improved perspectives towards the molecular mechanisms and selection pressure responsible for the evolution of NBS-LRR class resistance genes in plants.
Keywords: Diversification; Duplication; Evolution; NBS-LRRs; R-genes.