Abstract
Four members of the twist gene family (twist1a, 1b, 2, and 3) are found in the zebrafish, and they are thought to have arisen through three rounds of gene duplication, two of which occurred prior to the tetrapod-fish split. Phylogenetic analysis groups most of the vertebrate Twist1 peptides into clade I, except for the Twist1b proteins of the acanthopterygian fish (medaka, pufferfish, stickleback), which clustered within clade III. Paralogies and orthologies among the zebrafish, medaka, and human twist genes were determined using comparative synteny analysis of the chromosomal regions flanking these genes. Comparative nucleotide substitution analyses also revealed a faster rate of nucleotide mutation/substitution in the acanthopterygian twist1b compared to the zebrafish twist1b, thus accounting for their anomalous phylogenetic clustering. We also observed minimal expression overlap among the four twist genes, suggesting that despite their significant peptide similarity, their regulatory controls have diverged considerably, with minimal functional redundancy between them.
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Abbreviations
- hpf:
-
hours post-fertilization
- dpf:
-
days post-fertilization
- WISH:
-
whole-mount in situ hybridization
- UTR:
-
untranslated region
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Acknowledgments
We thank Vladimir Korzh, Jin Ben (Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore), and Karuna Sampath (Temasek Life Science Laboratories, Singapore) for invaluable advice, Monte Westerfield and Andrew D. Sharrocks for their gifts of dlx2a and fli1a (pAS160) plasmids respectively. This work was supported by grants R-178-000-104-112 (to SSC) from the National University of Singapore Academic Research Fund, and BMRC 06/1/21/19/459 (to SSC) and BMRC 07/1/21/19/544 (to CW) from the Biomedical Research Council of the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, Singapore.
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Yeo, G.H., Cheah, F.S.H., Winkler, C. et al. Phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships and developmental expression patterns of the zebrafish twist gene family. Dev Genes Evol 219, 289–300 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-009-0290-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-009-0290-z