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Divergent genes in gerbils: prevalence, relation to GC-biased substitution, and phenotypic relevance.

Yichen DaiRodrigo PracanaPeter W H Holland
Published in: BMC evolutionary biology (2020)
We show that through the course of gerbil evolution, many aberrantly divergent proteins have accumulated in the gerbil lineage, and GC-biased nucleotide substitution rather than positive selection is the likely cause of extreme divergence in more than half of these. Some proteins carry putatively deleterious changes that could be associated with metabolic and physiological phenotypes observed in some gerbil species. We propose that these animals provide a useful model to study the 'tug-of-war' between natural selection and the excessive accumulation of deleterious substitutions mutations through biased gene conversion.
Keyphrases
  • cerebral ischemia
  • genome wide
  • genome wide identification
  • risk factors
  • subarachnoid hemorrhage
  • climate change
  • gas chromatography
  • copy number
  • weight gain
  • single cell
  • body mass index
  • genetic diversity