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Several studies of nucleotide substitution patterns in mammalian species suggested that GC-rich isochores might be vanishing in mammalian genomes. However, the number of genes and the number of genomes included in these studies might not have given a reliable broad view of the trend in GC change in mammals. It is therefore worth exploiting this issue with a broader coverage of mammalian genomes using...
Gene duplication has different outcomes: pseudogenization (death of one of the two copies), gene amplification (both copies remain the same), sub-functionalization (both copies are required to perform the ancestral function) and neo-functionalization (one copy acquires a new function). Asymmetric evolution (one copy evolves faster than the other) is usually seen as a signature of neo-functionalization...
Given the unique thermal history of the Antarctic continent, fishes of dominant suborder Notothenioidei offer a remarkable opportunity to study the physiological and biochemical characters gained and, conversely, lost during their evolutionary history and to map this information on the species phylogenetic trees. The availability of phylogenetically related notothenioid taxa living in a wide range...
In the network of protein–protein interactions (PPIs), a loss and gain of the partnering proteins can cause drastic changes of network formation during evolution. With the aim of examining the evolutionary effects of the loss and gain of the partnering proteins on PPIs, we examined a relationship between evolutionary rates and losses and/or gains of PPIs for duplicated gene pairs encoding proteins...
Mammalian genomes are organised into a mosaic of regions (in general more than 300 kb in length), with differing, relatively homogeneous G+C contents. The G+C content is the basic characteristic of isochores, but they have also been associated with many other biological properties. For instance, the genes are more compact and their density is highest in G+C rich isochores. Various ways of locating...
Anemonefish are a group of 28 species of coral reef fish belonging to the family Pomacentridae, subfamily Amphiprioninae, all characterized by living in symbiosis with sea anemones of several genera. Some anemonefish are specialized to cooperate with a single or few species of sea anemone, being immune to their poisonous tentacles but sensible to those of other species of sea anemones, while other...
Very recent investigations have provided evidence for a higher DNA methylation level in polar and sub-antarctic fishes compared to temperate/tropical fishes, the latter being in turn higher than the DNA methylation level of warm-blooded vertebrates. These results confirm and extend the finding [Jabbari, K., Cacciò, S., Pais de Barros, J.P., Desgres, J., Bernardi G., 1997. Evolutionary changes in CpG...
Aging occurs in most multicellular animals, yet some primitive animals do not show any sign of aging. This raises the following question: How have metazoans acquired the trait of aging in the course of evolution? Comparative studies of various species have provided a clue to this question by showing that sexually reproducing organisms predominantly undergo aging. The evolutionary theory “pleiotropy”...
This paper deals with the theoretical foundation to estimate the relative efficiency (probability of inferring the true tree) of different nucleotide substitution models. A novel theoretical approach has been developed to estimate the relative efficiency of nucleotide substitution models based on the neighbor-relation method. The theory was developed directly by using the four-point condition. Initially...
The genomes of mammals and birds show dramatic variation in base composition over large scales, the so called isochore structure of the genome. The origin of isochores is still controversial: various neutral and selectionist models have been proposed – and criticized – since the discovery of isochores in the 1970s. The availability of complete mammalian genomes has yielded new opportunities for addressing...
This paper reports the existence of a significant negative correlation between GC12 and GC3 in the recently sequenced genome of Leishmania major. This result contradicts the previous evidence that the compositional correlations between codon positions are universal. Moreover, it challenges the interpretation of the GC12 vs. GC3 linear regression slope as the relative neutrality of GC12, within the...
Before any intelligence can appear, a world endowed with the potential for being experienced as a body of phenomena has to be existent. Indeed, if there is to be an intelligence, there first has to be something intelligible. Hence, when an intelligence is present, “creation” must already have taken place. Nevertheless, biological complexity has been deemed by some to be one of the privileged points...
The relationship between codon usage in prokaryotes and their ability to grow at extreme temperatures has been given much attention over the past years. Previous studies have suggested that the difference in synonymous codon usage between (hyper)thermophiles and mesophiles is a consequence of a selective pressure linked to growth temperature.Here, we performed an updated analysis of the variation...
Genomes are characterized by global and local compositional properties that are interesting in an evolutionary perspective but also provide useful information for the identification of some functional elements. Following previous studies, in this work we investigated compositional properties of non-coding sequences in four eukaryotic genomes (C. elegans, D. melanogaster, M. musculus, H. sapiens)....
To detect positive selection in protein-coding sequence evolution, the ratio of the nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rate (K A /K S ) is commonly used. When this ratio is higher than 1, positive selection on nonsynonymous changes is considered to have occurred. However, the question of what kinds of amino acid change are likely to be involved in positive selection has not been...
Previous investigations from our laboratory [Jabbari, K., Cacciò, S., Pais de Barros, J.P., Desgres, J., Bernardi G., 1997. Evolutionary changes in CpG and methylation levels in the genome of vertebrates. Gene 205, 109–118.] led to the discovery of two different methylation levels in the genomes of vertebrates, a higher one exhibited by fishes and amphibians and a lower one shown by mammals and birds...
Recent genomic analyses in Drosophila and mammals of inter-chromosomal retroposition have revealed that during evolution the retroposed genes that show male-biased expression tend to leave the X chromosome and opt for autosomal positions. Such a phenomenon may be a process of general, genomic and evolutionary relevance. It contributed to the unexpected overrepresentation of male-biased genes on the...
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