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Genome Biology and Evolution Advance Access originally published online on August 4, 2009
Genome Biology and Evolution (2009) Vol. 2009:258; doi:10.1093/gbe/evp026 published on August 20, 2009
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Evolution of Olfactory Receptor Genes in Primates Dominated by Birth-and-Death Process

Dong Dong*,{dagger}, Guimei He{dagger}, Shuyi Zhang{dagger} and Zhaolei Zhang*

* Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
{dagger} School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

E-mail: Zhaolei.Zhang{at}utortonto.ca.


  Abstract

Olfactory receptor (OR) is a large family of G protein–coupled receptors that can detect odorant in order to generate the sense of smell. They constitute one of the largest multiple gene families in animals including primates. To better understand the variation in odor perception and evolution of OR genes among primates, we computationally identified OR gene repertoires in orangutans, marmosets, and mouse lemurs and investigated the birth-and-death process of OR genes in the primate lineage. The results showed that 1) all the primate species studied have no more than 400 intact OR genes, fewer than rodents and canine; 2) Despite the similar number of OR genes in the genome, the makeup of the OR gene repertoires between different primate species is quite different as they had undergone dramatic birth-and-death evolution with extensive gene losses in the lineages leading to current species; 3) Apes and Old World monkey (OWM) have similar fraction of pseudogenes, whereas New World monkey (NWM) have fewer pseudogenes. To measure the selective pressure that had affected the OR gene repertoires in primates, we compared the ratio of nonsynonymous with synonymous substitution rates by using 70 one-to-one orthologous quintets among five primate species. We found that OR genes showed relaxed selective constraints in apes (humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans) than in OWMs (macaques) and NWMs (marmosets). We concluded that OR gene repertoires in primates have evolved in such a way to adapt to their respective living environments. Differential selective constraints might play important role in the primate OR gene evolution in each primate species.

Keywords: olfactory receptor, birth-and-death evolution, accelerated evolution, primates

Accepted July 29, 2009

Hidemi Watanabe, Associate Editor


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