Gene duplication is one of the key driving forces in the evolution of genes and important features of genomic architecture of living organisms including plants. Moreover, much of the plant diversity may have arisen largely due to duplication, followed by divergence and adaptive specialization of the pre existing genes (Ohno,1970; Zhang, 2003; Flagel & Wendel,2009). Current impetus on genomic sequence data provides substantial evidence for the profusion of duplicated genes in all organisms

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... ed. Functional divergence after gene duplication can possibly result in two alternative evolutionary fates: i) neofunctionalization where one copy acquires an entirely new function whereas the other copy maintains the original function. ii) Subfunctionalization, in which each copy adopts part of the task of their parental gene (