Molecular evolution of rodent insulins.

Several trees of amino acid sequences of rodent insulins were derived with the maximum-parsimony procedure. Possible orthologous and paralogous relationships were investigated. Except for a recent gene duplication in the ancestor of rat and mouse, there are no strong arguments for other paralogous relationships. Therefore, a tree in agreement with other biological data is the most reasonable one. According to this tree, the capacity to form zinc-binding hexamers was lost once in the ancestor of the hystricomorph rodents, followed by moderately increased evolutionary rates in the lineages to African porcupine and chinchilla but highly increased rates in at least three independent lines to other taxa of this suborder: guinea pig, cuis, and Octodontoidea (coypu and casiragua).