question: How could we infer functional associations from gene fusion events?
answer: The detection of gene fusion events across genomes can be used for the prediction of functional associations of proteins, based on the observation that related proteins in one organism (including physically interacting proteins/members of complexes, proteins involved in the same pathway) tend to be found in other species as a fused composite gene encoding a single multifunctional protein. For this purpose, gene fusion events may be used as the sole evidence or as independent information combined with other 'genome-aware' or similarity-based methods, and functional association may be predicted at different levels. An advantage of this approach is that it is not necessary to know the function of the composite/components to infer association.