Scientific news | A study explains how genetic changes are responsible for the evolution of phenotypic traits
Washington [US], Jan 08 (ANI): What genetic changes are responsible for the evolution of phenotypic traits? This question is not always easy to answer. A newly developed method now makes searching much easier.
Science speaks of “convergent evolution” in such cases, when animal species, but also plants, independently develop features that have the same form and function. There are many examples of this: Fish, for example, have fins, just like whales, even though they are mammals. Birds and bats have wings, and when it comes to using poisonous substances to defend themselves against attackers, many creatures, from jellyfish to scorpions to insects, have evolved the same instrument: the poisonous stinger.
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It is clear that scientists around the world are interested in finding out what changes in the genetic material of the respective species are responsible for the development of identical characteristics in them, even if there is no relationship between them.
The search for this is proving difficult: “Such traits, we speak of phenotypes, are of course always encoded in genomic sequences,” says plant physiologist Dr. Kenji Fukushima from Julius-Maximilians-Universitat (JMU) Wurzburg. Mutations, changes in the genetic material, can be the triggers for the development of new traits.
However, genetic changes rarely lead to phenotypic evolution because the underlying mutations are largely random and neutral. Thus, a large number of mutations accumulate on the extreme time scale in which evolutionary processes occur, making the detection of phenotypically important changes extremely difficult.
Now Fukushima and his colleague David D. Pollock of the University of Colorado (USA) have succeeded in developing a method that achieves significantly better results than previously used methods in searching for the genetic basis of phenotypic traits. They present their approach in the current issue of the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“We have developed a new molecular evolution metric that can accurately represent the rate of convergent evolution in protein-coding DNA sequences,” says Fukushima, describing the main result of the now-published work. This new method, she says, can reveal what genetic changes are associated with organisms’ phenotypes on an evolutionary time scale of hundreds of millions of years. Thus, it offers the possibility of expanding our understanding of how changes in DNA lead to phenotypic innovations that give rise to high species diversity.
A key development in the life sciences forms the basis of the work of Fukushima and Pollock: the fact that in recent years more and more genomic sequences of many living organisms in species diversity have been decoded and thus accessible for analysis. “This has made it possible to study the interrelationships of genotypes and phenotypes on a large scale at the macroevolutionary level,” says Fukushima.
However, because many molecular changes are nearly neutral and do not affect any trait, there is often a risk of “false positive convergence” when interpreting the data, i.e., the result predicts a correlation between a mutation and a trait. particular that doesn’t really exist. Furthermore, methodological biases could also be responsible for such false positive convergences.
“To overcome this problem, we extended the framework and developed a new metric that measures the error-adjusted rate of convergence of protein evolution,” explains Fukushima. This, she says, makes it possible to distinguish natural selection from genetic noise and phylogenetic errors in simulations and real-world examples. Enhanced with a heuristic algorithm, the approach enables two-way searches for genotype-phenotype associations, even in lineages that have diverged for hundreds of millions of years, she says.
The two scientists analyzed more than 20 million branch combinations in vertebrate genes to examine how well the metric they developed works. In a next step, they plan to apply this method to carnivorous plants. The goal is to decipher the genetic basis that is partly responsible for the ability of these plants to attract, capture, and digest prey.” To overcome this problem, we expanded the framework and developed a new metric that measures the rate of protein convergence adjusted for error. evolution,” explains Fukushima. This, she says, makes it possible to distinguish natural selection from genetic noise and phylogenetic errors in simulations and real-world examples. Enhanced with a heuristic algorithm, the approach enables two-way searches for genotype-phenotype associations, even in lineages that have diverged for hundreds of millions of years, she says.
The two scientists analyzed more than 20 million branch combinations in vertebrate genes to examine how well the metric they developed works. In a next step, they plan to apply this method to carnivorous plants. The goal is to decipher the genetic basis that is partly responsible for the ability of these plants to attract, capture, and digest prey. (AND ME)
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