从知识创新展望21世纪生物多样性科学

首先简要介绍汤佩松(1983)创新植物学,随后根据其创新思想分析了生物多样性三个层次研究的现状和问题。提出了一个根据DNA 序列变异尺度为标准的新的遗传多样性等级制度。为了避免物种和其他分类群的随意性, 建议以DNA 序列变异作为可操作的分类单元(OTU)和国际上进化上显著单元(ESU)相呼应。下一世纪的分子系统学和分子生态学可能重点研究DNA 变异, 特别是重复序列的变化对生物生命活动的调控, 在分子水平上揭示结构和功能的进化和适应。第三部分讨论Diversitas五个核心课题, 说明分子水平研究和生物技术对生物多样性保护和持续利用的重要性和迫切性。最后评论了" 天人合一" 为代表的反科学主义思潮, 坚持科学进步。     

中国野桑蚕性信息素合成激活肽(PBAN)基因的克隆及序列分析

根据家蚕(Bombyx mori)性信息素合成激活肽(pheromone biosynthesis activating neuropeptide,PBAN)基因DNA序列设计引物,扩增获得中国野桑蚕(Bombyx mandarina China)PBAN基因。分析表明,PBAN由33个氨基酸组成,在第14个氨基酸异亮氨酸和第15个氨基酸酪氨酸之间插入了698bp的内含子。根据PBAN及其基因cDNA、DNA序列分别构建分子进化树,结果显示3个水平比对结果构建的分子进化树有较好的一致性,推测PBAN基因可能适合于科、属之间的进化分析;并且PBAN基因内含子没有表现出特有的进化信息,推测PBAN基因内含子的进化与PBAN全长基因的进化在进化速率上并没有显著差别。相对于PBAN及α—SGNP、γ—SGNP,β—SGNP的进化速率相对较快,推测β—SGNP序列可能适合用于种间的进化分析。     

突脐孢属Brnl基因核苷酸序列比较及系统发育研究

对所有供试突脐孢菌株的Brnl基因(1,3,8-三羟基萘还原酶基因)扩增均获得PCR产物。序列比较表明：在种内各菌株间没有核苷酸序列长度变化,存在核苷酸序列简单代换;在种间核苷酸序列长度有变化,核苷酸的缺失或插入发生在内含子区;所有菌株编码区核苷酸序列长度相同;在种内水平氨基酸序列没有差别,显示出高度的保守性。利用最大简约法(Maximum Parsimony)和邻近结合法(Neighbor-joining)构建系统发育树,两个系统发育树的拓扑结构相似,不同种在不同的分支上。Brnl基因适合突脐孢属种级水平的分子系统学研究。     

RFLP分子标记及其在牧草研究中的应用

RFLP分子标记是用限制性酶(RE)消化不同个体的同源DNA分子,经电泳表现的限制性片段长度的差异。它反映了DNA分子水平上的变异,可能是限制性内切酶识别位点的改变,也可能是部分片段的缺失、插入、易位、倒位等,显示出丰富的多态性。本文综述了RFLP分子标记技术在牧草个体识别、绘制遗传图谱、目的基因定位、检测群体内或群体间序列差异程度以及辅助育种研究中的应用等,并对该技术在牧草研究中的应用作了展望。     

鸡传染性支气管炎病毒(IBV)广西流行株3'端非编码区序列分析

本研究应用RT-PCR方法扩增出分离自广西的26株鸡传染性支气管炎病毒(IBV)以及参考株M41和疫苗株H120、Ma5和4/91的3'端非编码区(3'UTR)的cDNA,并对其进行了克隆、序列测定、比较及其系统进化分析。序列分析结果表明,与Beaudette株的3'UTR序列相比较,26株分离的IBV中有1株和3株的分离株3'UTR序列分别插入了23个和2个碱基,另外有12株、6株、1株、2株和1株的分离株3'UTR序列分别缺失了1个、2个、22个、29个和84个碱基,不同毒株之间碱基数量最大相差达107个碱基。系统进化分析结果表明,26株分离株可分为4群,其中21株属于第Ⅰ群,与经典疫苗株H120的核苷酸同源性均较低(54.4%～75.5%);3株与4/91同属于第Ⅱ群;1株与H120同属于第Ⅲ群;另外1株单独属于Ⅴ群。综上所述,广西流行IBV的绝大部分毒株在3'UTR序列上与目前常用的疫苗株相比都发生了很大的变异,而且存在多种形式的碱基缺失和插入现象。由此,我们认为流行株的变异可能是疫苗不能提供有效保护的主要原因。     

基因组结构信息在动物系统发育研究中的应用

随着人类基因组和一些模式生物、重要经济生物以及大量微生物基因组测序的完成,生物学整体研究业已进入基因组时代.最近5～10年以来,利用基因组结构信息进行系统发育推断的研究形成了分类学和进化生物学中的前沿领域之一.相对于核苷酸或氨基酸序列中的突变而言,基因组的结构变化--内含子的插入/缺失、反转录子的整合、签名序列、基因重复以及基因排序等--是更大空间(或者时间空间)尺度上的相对稀缺的系统发育信息,一般用于科和科以上阶元间的亲缘关系研究.基因组全序列的获得和其中各基因位置的确定有利于将基因组中不同层次的系统发育信息综合起来,利用全面分子证据(total molecular evidence;包括基因组信息,DNA、RNA、蛋白质的序列信息,RNA和蛋白质的高级结构等)进行分子系统学研究.     

突脐孢属Brn1基因核苷酸序列比较及系统发育研究

对所有供试突脐孢菌株的Brn1基因 (1, 3, 8 -三羟基萘还原酶基因) 扩增均获得PCR产物。序列比较表明:在种内各菌株间没有核苷酸序列长度变化,存在核苷酸序列简单代换;在种间核苷酸序列长度有变化,核苷酸的缺失或插入发生在内含子区;所有菌株编码区核苷酸序列长度相同;在种内水平氨基酸序列没有差别,显示出高度的保守性。利用最大简约法(Maximum Parsimony)和邻近结合法(Neighbor-joining)构建系统发育树,两个系统发育树的拓扑结构相似,不同种在不同的分支上。Brn1基因适合突脐孢属种级水平的分子系统学研究。     

基于全基因组的龟鳖目Hox基因序列特征及进化分析

为对Hox基因在龟鳖目物种中进行系统地序列比较分析和进化研究，文章对目前具有染色体水平的龟鳖目基因组进行了Hox基因的鉴定,序列特征、进化和转录组分析。研究结果表明龟鳖物种的Hox基因簇是高度保守的。非重复序列的缺失导致鳖科HoxB9—HoxB13基因间区相对龟科短了10 kb。大量Hox基因编码区发生了鳖科或龟科特异的序列替换、插入和缺失。胸部骨骼发育相关的Hox基因在鳖科祖先发生了快速进化和受到正选择。Hox基因的表达具有组织、时期特异性,主要在胚胎时期的顶端外胚层嵴、背甲嵴和性腺表达。研究为龟鳖目Hox基因不同胚胎时期的多组学及表达调控分析提供了靶标,也为进一步厘清龟鳖物种演化创新提供了参考。     

鸡传染性法氏囊病病毒Gt株VP5基因缺失株感染性克隆的构建

传染性法氏囊病病毒 (IBDV)是双链,双节段RNA病毒,其基因组由A、B两个节段组成,编码结构蛋白VP1-VP4和非结构蛋白VP5。【目的】利用反向遗传操作构建拯救VP5基因缺失重组IBDV。【方法】利用体外定点突变技术,缺失IBDV Gt株VP5基因,通过多重PCR在基因组两端分别引入锤头状核酶序列(HamRz)和丁肝病毒核酶序列(HdvRz)。将带有核酶序列的IBDV基因组插入载体pCAGG的b肌动蛋白启动子下游,构建了IBDV感染性克隆pCAGGmGtA △VP5HRT,将该感染性克隆与pCAGGmGtBHRT共转染DFⅠ细胞。【结果】RT-PCR和间接免疫荧光均显示获得重组病毒,将其命名为rmGtA △VP5。IBDV VP5基因缺失感染性克隆的成功构建为从分子水平上深入研究vp5基因功能奠定了基础。     

毛竹微型颠倒重复序列的鉴定及分子标记开发

MITEs(miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements)又称颠倒重复序列,是缺少转座酶序列的非自主型转座子,在真核生物基因组含量丰富,是基因组多态性形成的重要驱动力之一。该研究利用MITE Tracker软件,在毛竹(Phyllostachys edulis)新版基因组中鉴定到1579个MITEs家族,共包括18373个全长MITEs,占毛竹基因组的0.34%,被归入到7个超家族。超家族的插入时间跨度为0.5~16.5 mya,其中有3个超家族在2~4 mya经历过一次扩增事件;2个超家族分别在1~2 mya和3~5 mya经历两次扩增事件;2个超家族在0.5~16.5 mya经历一次长期扩增。MITEs偏好插入基因或基因附近,且Micron-like超家族偏好插入ATT与ATA之间。该研究开发了3个分子标记,可从12份雷竹变种变型材料中鉴定出4份。综上所述,该文主要分析了毛竹基因组中MITEs的分布、进化及插入情况,并获得了3对可以区分雷竹变种变型的分子标记,为下一步验证MITEs功能奠定基础。     

Patterns of Insertion and Deletion in Mammalian Genomes

Nucleotide insertions and deletions (indels) are responsible for gaps in the sequence alignments. Indel is one of the major sources of evolutionary change at the molecular level. We have examined the patterns of insertions and deletions in the 19 mammalian genomes, and found that deletion events are more common than insertions in the mammalian genomes. Both the number of insertions and deletions decrease rapidly when the gap length increases and single nucleotide indel is the most frequent in all indel events. The frequencies of both insertions and deletions can be described well by power law.Key Words: Insertion, deletion, gap, indel, mammalian genome.     

Insertions and deletions trigger adaptive walks in Drosophila proteins

Maps that relate all possible genotypes or phenotypes to fitness--fitness landscapes--are central to the evolution of life, but remain poorly known. An insertion or a deletion (indel) of one or several amino acids constitutes a substantial leap of a protein within the space of amino acid sequences, and it is unlikely that after such a leap the new sequence corresponds precisely to a fitness peak. Thus, one can expect an indel in the protein-coding sequence that gets fixed in a population to be followed by some number of adaptive amino acid substitutions, which move the new sequence towards a nearby fitness peak. Here, we study substitutions that occur after a frame-preserving indel in evolving proteins of Drosophila. An insertion triggers 1.03 ± 0.75 amino acid substitutions within the protein region centred at the site of insertion, and a deletion triggers 4.77 ± 1.03 substitutions within such a region. The difference between these values is probably owing to a higher fraction of effectively neutral insertions. Almost all of the triggered amino acid substitutions can be attributed to positive selection, and most of them occur relatively soon after the triggering indel and take place upstream of its site. A high fraction of substitutions that follow an indel occur at previously conserved sites, suggesting that an indel substantially changes selection that shapes the protein region around it. Thus, an indel is often followed by an adaptive walk of length that is in agreement with the theory of molecular adaptation.     

Using evolutionary Expectation Maximization to estimate indel rates

MOTIVATION: The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, in the form of the Baum-Welch algorithm (for hidden Markov models) or the Inside-Outside algorithm (for stochastic context-free grammars), is a powerful way to estimate the parameters of stochastic grammars for biological sequence analysis. To use this algorithm for multiple-sequence evolutionary modelling, it would be useful to apply the EM algorithm to estimate not only the probability parameters of the stochastic grammar, but also the instantaneous mutation rates of the underlying evolutionary model (to facilitate the development of stochastic grammars based on phylogenetic trees, also known as Statistical Alignment). Recently, we showed how to do this for the point substitution component of the evolutionary process; here, we extend these results to the indel process. RESULTS: We present an algorithm for maximum-likelihood estimation of insertion and deletion rates from multiple sequence alignments, using EM, under the single-residue indel model owing to Thorne, Kishino and Felsenstein (the 'TKF91' model). The algorithm converges extremely rapidly, gives accurate results on simulated data that are an improvement over parsimonious estimates (which are shown to underestimate the true indel rate), and gives plausible results on experimental data (coronavirus envelope domains). Owing to the algorithm's close similarity to the Baum-Welch algorithm for training hidden Markov models, it can be used in an 'unsupervised' fashion to estimate rates for unaligned sequences, or estimate several sets of rates for sequences with heterogenous rates. AVAILABILITY: Software implementing the algorithm and the benchmark is available under GPL from http://www.biowiki.org/     

Is the rate of insertion and deletion mutation male biased?: Molecular evolutionary analysis of avian and primate sex chromosome sequences.

The rate of mutation for nucleotide substitution is generally higher among males than among females, likely owing to the larger number of DNA replications in spermatogenesis than in oogenesis. For insertion and deletion (indel) mutations, data from a few human genetic disease loci indicate that the two sexes may mutate at similar rates, possibly because such mutations arise in connection with meiotic crossing over. To address origin- and sex-specific rates of indel mutation we have conducted the first large-scale molecular evolutionary analysis of indels in noncoding DNA sequences from sex chromosomes. The rates are similar on the X and Y chromosomes of primates but about twice as high on the avian Z chromosome as on the W chromosome. The fact that indels are not uncommon on the nonrecombining Y and W chromosomes excludes meiotic crossing over as the main cause of indel mutation. On the other hand, the similar rates on X and Y indicate that the number of DNA replications (higher for Y than for X) is also not the main factor. Our observations are therefore consistent with a role of both DNA replication and recombination in the generation of short insertion and deletion mutations. A significant excess of deletion compared to insertion events is observed on the avian W chromosome, consistent with gradual DNA loss on a nonrecombining chromosome.     

Simultaneous statistical multiple alignment and phylogeny reconstruction

Although the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees and the computation of multiple sequence alignments are highly interdependent, these two areas of research lead quite separate lives, the former often making use of stochastic modeling, whereas the latter normally does not. Despite the fact that reasonable insertion and deletion models for sequence pairs were already introduced more than 10 years ago, they have only recently been applied to multiple alignment and only in their simplest version. In this paper we present and discuss a strategy based on simulated annealing, which makes use of these models to infer a phylogenetic tree for a set of DNA or protein sequences together with the sequences'indel history, i.e., their multiple alignment augmented with information about the positioning of insertion and deletion events in the tree. Our method is also the first application of the TKF2 model in the context of multiple sequence alignment. We validate the method via simulations and illustrate it using a data set of primate mtDNA.     

人类基因组上CpG岛的定位和系统分析

为了研究CpG岛产生和消失机制以及位于基因启动子区域外的CpG岛保守性等问题,我们通过序列比对和进化保守性分析等方法,分析在人类和小鼠中保守的基因上的CpG岛。结果显示已有保守序列的突变以及序列插入删除是CpG岛产生和消失的主要原因,进一步分析发现52%的在小鼠基因组上保守序列完全缺失的CpG岛位于两个转座子之间,提示转座子所介导的序列插入是CpG岛形成和消失的重要原因。人类基因组上在启动子区域外的CpG岛中约有79%为新产生的CpG岛,显著高于启动子区域内新产生的CpG岛比例(41%)。GO分析表明与这些CpG岛相关的部分基因与神经系统发育显著相关,提示新产生的CpG岛参与神经发育过程。     

indel-Seq-Gen: a new protein family simulator incorporating domains, motifs, and indels

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of protein sequences will provide a better understanding of divergence mechanisms of protein superfamilies and their functions. Long-term protein evolution often includes dynamic changes such as insertion, deletion, and domain shuffling. Such dynamic changes make reconstructing protein sequence evolution difficult and affect the accuracy of molecular evolutionary methods, such as multiple alignments and phylogenetic methods. Unfortunately, currently available simulation methods are not sufficiently flexible and do not allow biologically realistic dynamic protein sequence evolution. We introduce a new method, indel-Seq-Gen (iSG), that can simulate realistic evolutionary processes of protein sequences with insertions and deletions (indels). Unlike other simulation methods, iSG allows the user to simulate multiple subsequences according to different evolutionary parameters, which is necessary for generating realistic protein families with multiple domains. iSG tracks all evolutionary events including indels and outputs the "true" multiple alignment of the simulated sequences. iSG can also generate a larger sequence space by allowing the use of multiple related root sequences. With all these functions, iSG can be used to test the accuracy of, for example, multiple alignment methods, phylogenetic methods, evolutionary hypotheses, ancestral protein reconstruction methods, and protein family classification methods. We empirically evaluated the performance of iSG against currently available methods by simulating the evolution of the G protein-coupled receptor and lipocalin protein families. We examined their true multiple alignments, reconstruction of the transmembrane regions and beta-strands, and the results of similarity search against a protein database using the simulated sequences. We also presented an example of using iSG for examining how phylogenetic reconstruction is affected by high indel rates.     

Genetic evidence that both dNTP-stabilized and strand slippage mechanisms may dictate DNA polymerase errors within mononucleotide microsatellites

Mononucleotide microsatellites are tandem repeats of a single base pair, abundant within coding exons and frequent sites of mutation in the human genome. Because the repeated unit is one base pair, multiple mechanisms of insertion/deletion (indel) mutagenesis are possible, including strand-slippage, dNTP-stabilized, and misincorportion-misalignment. Here, we examine the effects of polymerase identity (mammalian Pols α, β, κ, and η), template sequence, dNTP pool size, and reaction temperature on indel errors during in vitro synthesis of mononucleotide microsatellites. We utilized the ratio of insertion to deletion errors as a genetic indicator of mechanism. Strikingly, we observed a statistically significant bias toward deletion errors within mononucleotide repeats for the majority of the 28 DNA template and polymerase combinations examined, with notable exceptions based on sequence and polymerase identity. Using mutator forms of Pol β did not substantially alter the error specificity, suggesting that mispairing-misalignment mechanism is not a primary mechanism. Based on our results for mammalian DNA polymerases representing three structurally distinct families, we suggest that dNTP-stabilized mutagenesis may be an alternative mechanism for mononucleotide microsatellite indel mutation. The change from a predominantly dNTP-stabilized mechanism to a strand-slippage mechanism with increasing microsatellite length may account for the differential rates of tandem repeat mutation that are observed genome-wide.     

Insertion and Deletion Mismatches Distant from the Target Position Improve Gene Correction with a Tailed Duplex

A 5′-tailed duplex (TD) DNA corrects a base-substitution mutation. In this study, the effects of insertion and deletion (indel) mismatches distant from the target position on the gene correction were examined. Three target plasmid DNAs with and without indel mismatches ～330 bases distant from the correction target position were prepared, and introduced into HeLa cells together with the TD. The indel mismatches improved the gene correction efficiency and specificity without sequence conversions at the indel mismatch site. These results suggested that the gene correction efficiency and specificity are increased when an appropriate second mismatch is introduced into the TD fragment.