| 1. |
- Aase-Remedios, Madeleine E., et al.
(författare)
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Evolution of the Spider Homeobox Gene Repertoire by Tandem and Whole Genome Duplication
- 2023
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 40:12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Gene duplication generates new genetic material that can contribute to the evolution of gene regulatory networks and phenotypes. Duplicated genes can undergo subfunctionalization to partition ancestral functions and/or neofunctionalization to assume a new function. We previously found there had been a whole genome duplication (WGD) in an ancestor of arachnopulmonates, the lineage including spiders and scorpions but excluding other arachnids like mites, ticks, and harvestmen. This WGD was evidenced by many duplicated homeobox genes, including two Hox clusters, in spiders. However, it was unclear which homeobox paralogues originated by WGD versus smaller-scale events such as tandem duplications. Understanding this is a key to determining the contribution of the WGD to arachnopulmonate genome evolution. Here we characterized the distribution of duplicated homeobox genes across eight chromosome-level spider genomes. We found that most duplicated homeobox genes in spiders are consistent with an origin by WGD. We also found two copies of conserved homeobox gene clusters, including the Hox, NK, HRO, Irx, and SINE clusters, in all eight species. Consistently, we observed one copy of each cluster was degenerated in terms of gene content and organization while the other remained more intact. Focussing on the NK cluster, we found evidence for regulatory subfunctionalization between the duplicated NK genes in the spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum compared to their single-copy orthologues in the harvestman Phalangium opilio. Our study provides new insights into the relative contributions of multiple modes of duplication to the homeobox gene repertoire during the evolution of spiders and the function of NK genes.
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| 2. |
- Abdalaal, Hind, et al.
(författare)
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Collateral toxicity limits the evolution of bacterial Release Factor 2 towards total omnipotence
- 2020
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 37:10, s. 2918-2930
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When new genes evolve through modification of existing genes, there are often trade-offs between the new and original functions, making gene duplication and amplification necessary to buffer deleterious effects on the original function. We have used experimental evolution of a bacterial strain lacking peptide release factor 1 (RF1) in order to study how peptide release factor 2 (RF2) evolves to compensate the loss of RF1. As expected, amplification of the RF2-encoding gene prfB to high copy number was a rapid initial response, followed by the appearance of mutations in RF2 and other components of the translation machinery. Characterization of the evolved RF2 variants by their effects on bacterial growth rate, reporter gene expression, and in vitro translation termination reveals a complex picture of reduced discrimination between the cognate and near cognate stop codons and highlight a functional trade-off that we term “collateral toxicity”. We suggest that this type of trade-off may be a more serious obstacle in new gene evolution than the more commonly discussed evolutionary trade-offs between “old” and “new” functions of a gene, as it cannot be overcome by gene copy number changes. Further, we suggest a model for how RF2 autoregulation responds not only to alterations in the demand for RF2 activity, but also for RF1 activity.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Adler, M, et al.
(författare)
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Controls for Phylogeny and Robust Analysis in Pareto Task Inference
- 2022
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1537-1719 .- 0737-4038. ; 39:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding the tradeoffs faced by organisms is a major goal of evolutionary biology. One of the main approaches for identifying these tradeoffs is Pareto task inference (ParTI). Two recent papers claim that results obtained in ParTI studies are spurious due to phylogenetic dependence (Mikami T, Iwasaki W. 2021. The flipping t-ratio test: phylogenetically informed assessment of the Pareto theory for phenotypic evolution. Methods Ecol Evol. 12(4):696–706) or hypothetical p-hacking and population-structure concerns (Sun M, Zhang J. 2021. Rampant false detection of adaptive phenotypic optimization by ParTI-based Pareto front inference. Mol Biol Evol. 38(4):1653–1664). Here, we show that these claims are baseless. We present a new method to control for phylogenetic dependence, called SibSwap, and show that published ParTI inference is robust to phylogenetic dependence. We show how researchers avoided p-hacking by testing for the robustness of preprocessing choices. We also provide new methods to control for population structure and detail the experimental tests of ParTI in systems ranging from ammonites to cancer gene expression. The methods presented here may help to improve future ParTI studies.
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| 5. |
- Adler, Marlen, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
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High Fitness Costs and Instability of Gene Duplications Reduce Rates of Evolution of New Genes by Duplication-Divergence Mechanisms
- 2014
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 31:6, s. 1526-1535
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An important mechanism for generation of new genes is by duplication-divergence of existing genes. Duplication-divergence includes several different sub-models, such as subfunctionalization where after accumulation of neutral mutations the original function is distributed between two partially functional and complementary genes, and neofunctionalization where a new function evolves in one of the duplicated copies while the old function is maintained in another copy. The likelihood of these mechanisms depends on the longevity of the duplicated state, which in turn depends on the fitness cost and genetic stability of the duplications. Here, we determined the fitness cost and stability of defined gene duplications/amplifications on a low copy number plasmid. Our experimental results show that the costs of carrying extra gene copies are substantial and that each additional kbp of DNA reduces fitness by approximately 0.15%. Furthermore, gene amplifications are highly unstable and rapidly segregate to lower copy numbers in absence of selection. Mathematical modelling shows that the fitness costs and instability strongly reduces the likelihood of both sub- and neofunctionalization, but that these effects can be off-set by positive selection for novel beneficial functions.
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| 6. |
- Adolfsson, Sofia, et al.
(författare)
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Lack of Dosage Compensation Accompanies the Arrested Stage of Sex Chromosome Evolution in Ostriches
- 2013
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 30:4, s. 806-810
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sex chromosome evolution is usually seen as a process that, once initiated, will inevitably progress toward an advanced stage of degeneration of the nonrecombining chromosome. However, despite evidence that avian sex chromosome evolution was initiated > 100 Ma, ratite birds have been trapped in an arrested stage of sex chromosome divergence. We performed RNA sequencing of several tissues from male and female ostriches and assembled the transcriptome de novo. A total of 315 Z-linked genes fell into two categories: those that have equal expression level in the two sexes (for which Z-W recombination still occurs) and those that have a 2-fold excess of male expression (for which Z-W recombination has ceased). We suggest that failure to evolve dosage compensation has constrained sex chromosome divergence in this basal avian lineage. Our results indicate that dosage compensation is a prerequisite for, not only a consequence of, sex chromosome evolution.
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| 7. |
- Ali, Raja Hashim, et al.
(författare)
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Identifying Clusters of High Confidence Homologies in Multiple Sequence Alignments
- 2019
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : OXFORD UNIV PRESS. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 36:10, s. 2340-2351
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is ubiquitous in evolution and bioinformatics. MSAs are usually taken to be a known and fixed quantity on which to perform downstream analysis despite extensive evidence that MSA accuracy and uncertainty affect results. These errors are known to cause a wide range of problems for downstream evolutionary inference, ranging from false inference of positive selection to long branch attraction artifacts. The most popular approach to dealing with this problem is to remove (filter) specific columns in the MSA that are thought to be prone to error. Although popular, this approach has had mixed success and several studies have even suggested that filtering might be detrimental to phylogenetic studies. We present a graph-based clustering method to address MSA uncertainty and error in the software Divvier (available at https://github.com/simonwhelan/Divvier), which uses a probabilistic model to identify clusters of characters that have strong statistical evidence of shared homology. These clusters can then be used to either filter characters from the MSA (partial filtering) or represent each of the clusters in a new column (divvying). We validate Divvier through its performance on real and simulated benchmarks, finding Divvier substantially outperforms existing filtering software by retaining more true pairwise homologies calls and removing more false positive pairwise homologies. We also find that Divvier, in contrast to other filtering tools, can alleviate long branch attraction artifacts induced by MSA and reduces the variation in tree estimates caused by MSA uncertainty.
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| 8. |
- Ament-Velásquez, Sandra Lorena, Ph.D. 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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The Dynamics of Adaptation to Stress from Standing Genetic Variation and de novo Mutations
- 2022
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 39:11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Adaptation from standing genetic variation is an important process underlying evolution in natural populations, but we rarely get the opportunity to observe the dynamics of fitness and genomic changes in real time. Here, we used experimental evolution and Pool-Seq to track the phenotypic and genomic changes of genetically diverse asexual populations of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in four environments with different fitness costs. We found that populations rapidly and in parallel increased in fitness in stressful environments. In contrast, allele frequencies showed a range of trajectories, with some populations fixing all their ancestral variation in <30 generations and others maintaining diversity across hundreds of generations. We detected parallelism at the genomic level (involving genes, pathways, and aneuploidies) within and between environments, with idiosyncratic changes recurring in the environments with higher stress. In particular, we observed a tendency of becoming haploid-like in one environment, whereas the populations of another environment showed low overall parallelism driven by standing genetic variation despite high selective pressure. This work highlights the interplay between standing genetic variation and the influx of de novo mutations in populations adapting to a range of selective pressures with different underlying trait architectures, advancing our understanding of the constraints and drivers of adaptation.
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| 9. |
- Amiri, H., et al.
(författare)
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Proliferation and deterioration of Rickettsia palindromic elements
- 2002
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 19:8, s. 1234-1243
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It has been suggested that Rickettsia Palindromic Elements (RPEs) have evolved as selfish DNA that mediate protein sequence evolution by being targeted to genes that code for RNA and proteins. Here, we have examined the phylogenetic depth of two RPEs that are located close to the genes encoding elongation factors Tu (tuf) and G (fus) in Rickettsia. An exceptional organization of the elongation factor genes was found in all 11 species examined, with complete or partial RPEs identified downstream of the tuf gene (RPE-tuf) in six species and of the fus gene (RPE-fus) in 10 species. A phylogenetic reconstruction shows that both RPE-tuf and RPE-fus have evolved in a manner that is consistent with the expected species divergence. The analysis provides evidence for independent loss of RPE-tuf in several species, possibly mediated by short repetitive sequences flanking the site of excision. The remaining RPE-tuf sequences evolve as neutral sequences in different stages of deterioration. Likewise, highly fragmented remnants of the RPE-fus sequence were identified in two species. This suggests that genome-specific differences in the content of RPEs are the result of recent loss rather than recent proliferation.
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| 10. |
- Andersson, Jan O, et al.
(författare)
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Genome degradation is an ongoing process in Rickettsia
- 1999
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : SOC MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EVOLUTION. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 16:9, s. 1178-1191
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- To study reductive evolutionary processes in bacterial genomes, we examine sequences in the Rickettsia genomes which are unconstrained by selection and evolve as pseudogenes, one of which is the metK gene, which codes for AdoMet synthetase. Here, we sequenced the metK gene and three surrounding genes in eight different species of the genus Rickettsia. The metK gene was found to contain a high incidence of deletions in six lineages, while the three genes in its surroundings were functionally conserved in all eight lineages. A more drastic example of gene degradation was identified in the metK downstream region, which contained an open reading frame in Rickettsia felis. Remnants of this open reading frame could be reconstructed in five additional species by eliminating sites of frameshift mutations and termination codons. A detailed examination of the two reconstructed genes revealed that deletions strongly predominate over insertions and that there is a strong transition bias for point mutations which is coupled to an excess of GC-to-AT substitutions. Since the molecular evolution of these inactive genes should reflect the rates and patterns of neutral mutations, our results strongly suggest that there is a high spontaneous rate of deletions as well as a strong mutation bias toward AT pairs in the Rickettsia genomes. This may explain the low genomic G + C content (29%), the small genome size (1.1 Mb), and the high noncoding content (24%), as well as the presence of several pseudogenes in the Rickettsia prowazekii genome.
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