Positive Darwinian selection in the singularly large taste receptor gene family of an 'ancient' fish, Latimeria chalumnae.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Chemical senses are one of the foremost means by which organisms make sense of their environment, among them the olfactory and gustatory sense of vertebrates and arthropods. Both senses use large repertoires of receptors to achieve perception of complex chemosensory stimuli. High evolutionary dynamics of some olfactory and gustatory receptor gene families result in considerable variance of chemosensory perception between species. Interestingly, both ora/v1r genes and the closely related t2r genes constitute small and rather conserved families in teleost fish, but show rapid evolution and large species differences in tetrapods. To understand this transition, chemosensory gene repertoires of earlier diverging members of the tetrapod lineage, i.e. lobe-finned fish such as L

SUBMITTER: Syed AS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4132921 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature