MBE Advance Access originally published online on March 1, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(5):1198-1207; doi:10.1093/molbev/msm038
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© 2007 The Authors.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Research Articles |
Molecular Evolution of Drosophila Odorant Receptor Genes
,
* Penn Center for Bioinformatics, University of Pennsylvania
Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania
Genomics and Computational Biology Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: junhyong{at}sas.upenn.edu.
Accepted for publication February 26, 2007.
A total of 752 odorant receptor (Or) genes, including pseudogenes, were identified in 11 Drosophila species and named after their orthologs in Drosophila melanogaster. The 813 Or genes, including 61 from D. melanogaster, were classified into 59 orthologous groups that are well supported by gene phylogeny. By reconciling with the gene family phylogeny, we estimated the number of gene duplication/loss events and intron gain/loss events in the species phylogeny. We found that these events are particularly frequent in Drosophila grimshawi, Drosophila willistoni, and obscura group. More than half of the duplicated genes stay as tandem arrays, whose size range from 2 to 8. These genes vary in sequence and some likely underwent positive selection, indicating that the gene duplication was important for flies to acquire new olfactory functions. We hypothesize that Or genes conferred the basic olfactory repertoire to ancestral flies before the speciation of the Drosophila and Sophophora subgenera about 40 Mya. This repertoire has been largely maintained in the current species, whereas lineage-specific gene duplication seems to have led to additional specialization in some species in response to specific ecological conditions.
Key Words: Drosophila • odorant receptor • molecular evolution • phylogeny • duplication
Adriana Briscoe, Associate Editor
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