Elephant shark genome provides unique insights into gnathostome evolution
By B. Venkatesh, Alison P. Lee, V. Ravi, A. Maurya, M. Lian, J. Swann, Y. Ohta, M. Flajnik, Y. Sutoh, M. Kasahara and 23 more. Nature, 2014
670 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The emergence of jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes) from jawless vertebrates was accompanied by major morphological and physiological innovations, such as hinged jaws, paired fins and immunoglobulin-based adaptive immunity. Gnathostomes subsequently diverged into two groups, the cartilaginous fishes and the bony vertebrates. Here we report the whole-genome analysis of a cartilaginous fish, the elephant shark (Callorhinchus milii). We find that the C. milii genome is the slowest evolving of all known vertebrates, including the ‘living fossil’ coelacanth, and features extensive synteny conservation with tetrapod genomes, making it a good model for comparative analyses of gnathostome genomes. Our functional studies suggest that the lack of genes encoding secreted calcium-binding phosphoproteins in cartilaginous fishes explains the absence of bone in their endoskeleton. Furthermore, the adaptive immune system of cartilaginous fishes is unusual: it lacks the canonical CD4 co-receptor and most transcription factors, cytokines and cytokine receptors related to the CD4 lineage, despite the presence of polymorphic major histocompatibility complex class II molecules. It thus presents a new model for understanding the origin of adaptive immunity.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d06efb8c2676f76fa828f25c0e2dbd37c9cb2c7a
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Citations in the corpus
- The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2015 update (2014, background): “Analysis of the 9-GB draft assembly reported this shark to be the slowest evolving of known vertebrates, displaying extensive conservation of synteny with tetrapods and an unusual adaptive immune system (28).”
- The Genome 10K Project: A Way Forward (2015, positive): “Whether it is the genome of the giant panda (13), with its revelations about the genetics of its ability to digest bamboo; the elephant shark (14), as a model for the evolution of the vertebrate body plan; or theminkewhale (15), providing a glimpse into the adaptations associated with becoming aquat”
- A highly conserved program of neuronal microexons is misregulated in autistic brains (2014, methodology): “In addition, we employed previously defined (Venkatesh et al., 2014) clusters of 1-to-1 orthologs for 10 vertebrate species using InParanoid, including”
- The Function of Fish Cytokines (2016, background): “An IFN-γ orthologue is also present in the elephant shark [86].”