Figure 1

Depiction of a conversion event. First, a genomic region A is copied into a new position by a duplication event, forming an additional paralogous copy B. Over time, the two paralogs (A and B) diverge due to small mutations. Then, a conversion event overwrites a portion of one paralog (e.g. B) with the corresponding portion from the other paralog, so that A and B become more similar in that sub-region than elsewhere.