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MBE Advance Access published online on January 24, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn021
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© The Author 2008. 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

Research Article

Concerted Evolution of sea anemone neurotoxin genes is revealed through analysis of the Nematostella vectensis genome

Yehu Moran1,4, Hagar Weinberger1, James C. Sullivan2, Adam M. Reitzel2,3, John R. Finnerty2 and Michael Gurevitz1,4

1 Department of Plant Sciences, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel
2 Department of Biology, Boston University, 5 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, USA

Received for publication November 15, 2007. Revision received January 17, 2008. Accepted for publication January 20, 2008.

Gene families that encode toxins are found in many poisonous animals, yet there is limited understanding of their evolution at the nucleotide level. The release of the genome draft sequence for the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis enabled a comprehensive study of a gene family whose neurotoxin products affect voltage-gated sodium channels. All gene family members are clustered in a highly repetitive ~30 kb genomic region and encode a single toxin, Nv1. These genes exhibit extreme conservation at the nucleotide level that cannot be explained by purifying selection. This conservation greatly differs from the toxin gene families of other animals (e.g. snakes, scorpions, cone snails), whose evolution was driven by diversifying selection, thereby generating a high degree of genetic diversity. The low nucleotide diversity at the Nv1 genes is reminiscent of that reported for DNA encoding ribosomal RNA (rDNA) and two hsp70 genes from Drosophila, which have evolved via concerted evolution. This evolutionary pattern was experimentally demonstrated in yeast rDNA and was shown to involve unequal crossing-over. Through sequence analysis of toxin genes from multiple N. vectensis populations and two other anemone species, Anemonia viridis and Actinia equina, we observed that the toxin genes for each sea anemone species are more similar to one another than to those of other species, suggesting they evolved by manner of concerted evolution. Furthermore, in two of the species (A. viridis and A. equina) we found genes that evolved under diversifying selection, suggesting that concerted evolution and accelerated evolution may occur simultaneously.

Key Words: sea anemone toxins • concerted evolution • Nematostella vectensis

3 Present address: Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543

4 Corresponding authors: Michael Gurevitz and Yehu Moran, Department of Plant Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv 69978, Tel-Aviv, Israel. one: 972-3-6409844 Fax: 972-3-6406100, E-mail address: mamgur{at}post.tau.ac.il moranyeh{at}post.tau.ac.il


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