Published online 24 September 2004
Nucleic Acids Research, Vol. 32 No. 17 © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved
Comparative analysis of complete genomes reveals gene loss, acquisition and acceleration of evolutionary rates in Metazoa, suggests a prevalence of evolution via gene acquisition and indicates that the evolutionary rates in animals tend to be conserved
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 301 594 6993; Fax: +1 301 435 7794; Email: krylov{at}ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Received July 2, 2004; Revised August 4, 2004; Accepted August 30, 2004
In this study we systematically examined the differences between the proteomes of Metazoa and other eukaryotes. Metazoans (Homo sapiens, Ceanorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster) were compared with a plant (Arabidopsis thaliana), fungi (Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccaromyces pombe) and Encephalitozoan cuniculi. We identified 159 gene families that were probably lost in the Metazoan branch and 1263 orthologous families that were specific to Metazoa and were likely to have originated in their last common ancestor (LCA). We analyzed the evolutionary rates of pan-eukaryotic protein families and identified those with higher rates in animals. The acceleration was shown to occur in: (i) the LCA of Metazoa or (ii) independently in the Metazoan phyla. A high proportion of the accelerated Metazoan protein families was found to participate in translation and ribosome biogenesis, particularly mitochondrial. By functional analysis we show that no metabolic pathway in animals evolved faster than in other organisms. We conclude that evolution in the LCA of Metazoa was extensive and proceeded largely by gene duplication and/or invention rather than by modification of extant proteins. Finally, we show that the rate of evolution of a gene family in animals has a clear, but not absolute, tendency to be conserved.
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