Abstract
Carnivores exhibit various fat contents and energy reserves to adapt to their environments. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying lipid metabolic differences among carnivores have not been well explored. Long-chain acyl-CoA synthetases (ACSLs) catalyze the initial step in lipid metabolism by activating fatty acids (FAs), and they drive acyl-CoAs toward anabolic lipid synthesis or catabolic β-oxidation. We identified the sequences of the genes of the ACSL family (ACSL1, ACSL3, ACSL4, ACSL5 and ACSL6) in the sable (Martes zibellina) via transcriptome sequencing. The ACSL gene sequences of 13 other carnivores were obtained from NCBI. Phylogenetic results showed that unlike the widely accepted carnivore phylogeny, Canidae and Felidae tend to group together based on ACSL4 and ACSL6. The evolutionary analyses identified a series of positively selected amino acid residues in ACSL1, ACSL4 and ACSL5. Two radical amino acid substitutions detected in sable suggested potential insights into the molecular mechanism underlying the relatively low fat content in this animal. This is the first study to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the adaptive evolution of fat metabolism in carnivores. Overall, the ACSL genes were under different evolutionary forces in carnivores, and some genes have undergone adaptive evolution in lipid metabolism.
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This work was supported by Special Fund for Forest Scientific Research in the Public Welfare (201404420), National Natural Science Fund of China (31372220, 31672313).
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Additional file S1. Table S1 Accession numbers and sources of the retrieved ACSL sequences for the species included in this study (DOC 143 KB)
Additional file S10. Table S4 Likelihood ratio tests of branch models for the ACSL genes (XLS 42 KB)
10709_2019_57_MOESM11_ESM.png
Additional file S11. Spatial distribution of positively selected sites in the three-dimensional (3D) structure of ACSL1 (PNG 224 KB)
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Zhao, C., Liu, G., Shang, S. et al. Adaptive evolution of the ACSL gene family in Carnivora. Genetica 147, 141–148 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-019-00057-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-019-00057-3