Institute of Molecular Ecology and Evolution, iAIR, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e31540. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031540. Epub 2012 Feb 29.
Chemosensory receptors (CR) are crucial for animals to sense the environmental changes and survive on earth. The emergence of whole-genome sequences provides us an opportunity to identify the entire CR gene repertoires. To completely gain more insight into the evolution of CR genes in vertebrates, we identified the nearly all CR genes in 25 vertebrates using homology-based approaches. Among these CR gene repertoires, nearly half of them were identified for the first time in those previously uncharacterized species, such as the guinea pig, giant panda and elephant, etc. Consistent with previous findings, we found that the numbers of CR genes vary extensively among different species, suggesting an extreme form of 'birth-and-death' evolution. For the purpose of facilitating CR gene analysis, we constructed a database with the goals to provide a resource for CR genes annotation and a web tool for exploring their evolutionary patterns. Besides a search engine for the gene extraction from a specific chromosome region, an easy-to-use phylogenetic analysis tool was also provided to facilitate online phylogeny study of CR genes. Our work can provide a rigorous platform for further study on the evolution of CR genes in vertebrates.
化学感受器受体（CR）对于动物感知环境变化和在地球上生存至关重要。全基因组序列的出现为我们提供了识别整个 CR 基因库的机会。为了更全面地了解脊椎动物 CR 基因的进化，我们使用基于同源性的方法在 25 种脊椎动物中鉴定了几乎所有的 CR 基因。在这些 CR 基因库中，有近一半是首次在以前未被描述的物种中鉴定出来的，如豚鼠、大熊猫和大象等。与先前的发现一致，我们发现 CR 基因的数量在不同物种之间差异很大，表明这是一种极端形式的“诞生和死亡”进化。为了方便 CR 基因分析，我们构建了一个数据库，旨在为 CR 基因注释提供资源，并为探索其进化模式提供一个网络工具。除了从特定染色体区域提取基因的搜索引擎外，还提供了一个易于使用的系统发育分析工具，以方便在线研究 CR 基因的系统发育。我们的工作可以为进一步研究脊椎动物 CR 基因的进化提供一个严谨的平台。
