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MBE Advance Access published online on March 14, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msk002
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted March 1, 2006

Letter

Adaptive Protein Evolution and Regulatory Divergence in Drosophila

Jeffrey M. Good 1 *, Celine A. Hayden 2, and Travis J. Wheeler 3

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721
2 Department of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721
3 Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jeffrey M. Good, E-mail: jgood{at}email.arizona.edu


  Abstract

Two recent studies demonstrated a positive correlation between divergence in gene expression and protein sequence in Drosophila. This correlation could be driven by positive selection or variation in functional constraint. To distinguish between these alternatives we compared patterns of molecular evolution for 1,862 genes with two previously reported estimates of expression divergence in Drosophila. We found a slight negative trend (nonsignifcant) between positive selection on protein sequence and divergence in expression levels between D. melanogaster and D. simulans. Conversely, shifts in expression patterns during Drosophila development showed a positive association with adaptive protein evolution, though as before the relationship was weak and not significant. Overall, we found no strong evidence for an increase in the incidence of positive selection on protein coding regions in genes with divergent expression in Drosophila, suggesting the previously reported positive association between protein and regulatory divergence primarily reflects variation in functional constraint.

Keywords: gene expression; positive selection; protein evolution.
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