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论文题目: Parallel sites implicate functional convergence of the hearing gene prestin among echolocating mammals
作者: Zhen Liu; Fei-Yan; Xin Zhou; Hai-Qing Ren; Peng Shi*
联系作者: ship@mail.kiz.ac.cn
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发表年度: 2014
卷: 31
期: 9
页码: 2415-2424
摘要:
Echolocation is a sensory system whereby certain mammals navigate and forage using sound waves, usually in environments where visibility is limited. Curiously, echolocation has evolved independently in bats and whales, which occupy entirely different environments. Based on this phenotypic convergence, recent studies identified several echolocation-related genes with parallel sites at the protein sequence level among different echolocating mammals, and among these, prestin seems the most promising. Although previous studies analyzed the evolutionary mechanism of prestin, the functional roles of the parallel sites in the evolution of mammalian echolocation are not clear. By functional assays, we show that a key parameter of prestin function, 1/alpha, is increased in all echolocating mammals and that the N7T parallel substitution accounted for this functional convergence. Moreover, another parameter, V1/2, was shifted toward the depolarization direction in a toothed whale, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) and a constant-frequency (CF) bat, the Stoliczka's trident bat (Aselliscus stoliczkanus). The parallel site of I384T between toothed whales and CF bats was responsible for this functional convergence. Furthermore, the two parameters (1/alpha and V1/2) were correlated with mammalian high-frequency hearing, suggesting that the convergent changes of the prestin function in echolocating mammals may play important roles in mammalian echolocation. To our knowledge, these findings present the functional patterns of echolocation-related genes in echolocating mammals for the first time and rigorously demonstrate adaptive parallel evolution at the protein sequence level, paving the way to insights into the molecular mechanism underlying mammalian echolocation.

The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution

刊物名称: Molecular Biology and Evolution
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影响因子: 9.105 (2014)
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