Are orthologs and paralogs examples of conserved genes? Orthologs are the genes or DNA that is present in 2 different species, having once been present in a common ancestor. It comes about by a speciation event. Paralogs come about by gene duplication events.
So, would we characterize these genes as conserved genes?
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To my understanding, paralogs and orthologs refers, as you said, to the relative isolation of gene copy to the isolation of populations (and eventually species).
Gene conservation on the other hand refers to the variability of a given gene along many species. If a gene does not show any variance along many species, than we say that it is a conserved gene.
Eventually, gene duplication may allow for neo-functionalisation, sub-functionalisation or loss yielding to variance among this gene copy. Aside the philosophical problem of what is the identity of the gene, there is no relationships between the concepts of orthologs versus paralogs and gene duplication.
Yes, of course they are conserved. Conservation is basically a measure of sequence identity. It can be used to describe the relationship between both paralogs (genes created by a duplication event) and orthologs (genes created by a speciaton event). Any type of homology relationship can be described in terms of the conservation (sequence similarity) between the genes investigated.
Even entire genomes can be described as more or less conserved.
