Extraordinarily low evolutionary rates of short wavelength-sensitive opsin pseudogenes |
| |
Authors: | Shozo Yokoyama William T Starmer Yang Liu Takashi Tada Lyle Britt |
| |
Institution: | 1. Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA;2. Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA;3. Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, WA 98115, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Aquatic organisms such as cichlids, coelacanths, seals, and cetaceans are active in UV–blue color environments, but many of them mysteriously lost their abilities to detect these colors. The loss of these functions is a consequence of the pseudogenization of their short wavelength-sensitive (SWS1) opsin genes without gene duplication. We show that the SWS1 gene (BdenS1ψ) of the deep-sea fish, pearleye (Benthalbella dentata), became a pseudogene in a similar fashion about 130 million years ago (Mya) yet it is still transcribed. The rates of nucleotide substitution (~ 1.4 × 10− 9/site/year) of the pseudogenes of these aquatic species as well as some prosimian and bat species are much smaller than the previous estimates for the globin and immunoglobulin pseudogenes. |
| |
Keywords: | SWS1 short wavelength-sensitive type 1 RH1 rhodopsin RH2 RH1-like M/LWS middle and long wavelength-sensitive ENCODE the encyclopedia of DNA elements NJ neighbor-joining ML maximum likelihood NEB naive empirical Bayes BEB Bayes empirical Bayes Mya million years ago |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |
|