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Molecular parallelism in fast-twitch muscle proteins in echolocating mammals

  • Detecting associations between genomic changes and phenotypic differences is fundamental to understanding how phenotypes evolved. By systematically screening for parallel amino acid substitutions, we detected known as well as novel cases (Strc, Tecta, and Cabp2) of parallelism between echolocating bats and toothed whales in proteins that could contribute to high-frequency hearing adaptations. Our screen also showed that echolocating mammals exhibit an unusually high number of parallel substitutions in fast-twitch muscle fiber proteins. Both echolocating bats and toothed whales produce an extremely rapid call rate when homing in on their prey, which was shown in bats to be powered by specialized superfast muscles. We show that these genes with parallel substitutions (Casq1, Atp2a1, Myh2, and Myl1) are expressed in the superfast sound-producing muscle of bats. Furthermore, we found that the calcium storage protein calsequestrin 1 of the little brown bat and the bottlenose dolphin functionally converged in its ability to form calcium-sequestering polymers at lower calcium concentrations, which may contribute to rapid calcium transients required for superfast muscle physiology. The proteins that our genomic screen detected could be involved in the convergent evolution of vocalization in echolocating mammals by potentially contributing to both rapid Ca2+ transients and increased shortening velocities in superfast muscles.

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Author:Jun Hoe Lee, Kevin M. Lewis, Timothy W. Moural, Bogdan M. KirilenkoORCiDGND, Barbara Borgonovo, Gisa Prange, Manfred KösslORCiD, Stefan Huggenberger, ChulHee Kang, Michael HillerORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-476835
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat9660
ISSN:2375-2548
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30263960
Parent Title (English):Science advances
Publisher:Assoc.
Place of publication:Washington, DC [u. a.]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2018
Date of first Publication:2018/09/26
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2018/10/11
Volume:4
Issue:9, eaat9660
Page Number:12
First Page:1
Last Page:11
Note:
Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
HeBIS-PPN:439212693
Institutes:Biowissenschaften / Biowissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 57 Biowissenschaften; Biologie / 570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (English):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell 4.0