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MBE Advance Access published online on December 22, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn294
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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

Letter

A signature of evolutionary constraint on a subset of ectopically expressed olfactory receptor genes

Omar De la Cruz1, Ran Blekhman2, Xiaohong Zhang4, Dan Nicolae1,3, Stuart Firestein4 and Yoav Gilad2

1 Department of Statistics
2 Department of Human Genetics
3 Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637
4 Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

Correspondence should be addressed to YG (gilad{at}uchicago.edu)

Received for publication December 2, 2008. Accepted for publication December 17, 2008.

Olfactory receptor (OR) genes constitute the basis for the sense of smell. It has long been observed that a subset of mammalian OR genes are expressed in non-olfactory tissues, in addition to their expression in the olfactory epithelium. However, it is unknown whether OR genes have alternative functions in the non-olfactory tissues. Using a dedicated microarray, we surveyed OR gene expression in olfactory epithelium as well as a number of non-olfactory tissues, in human and chimpanzee. Our observations suggest that ectopically expressed OR orthologous genes are expressed in the same non-olfactory tissues in human and chimpanzee more often than expected by chance alone. Moreover, we found that the subset of orthologous OR genes with conserved ectopic expression evolve under stronger evolutionary constraint than OR genes expressed exclusively in the olfactory epithelium. Thus, although we cannot provide direct functional data, our observations are consistent with the notion that a subset of ectopically expressed OR genes have additional functions in non-olfactory tissues.


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