Intermittent divergence of the protein tyrosine kinase family during animal evolution.

The protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) are a large protein family consisting of many subfamilies with a variety of domain structures. The basic functions are thought to differ for different subfamilies. To know the dates at which the subfamilies diverged by gene duplications, a phylogenetic tree of the PTKs was inferred by comparing sequences from a wide range of species covering diploblasts and triploblasts. The PTK tree revealed that almost all of the gene duplications that gave rise to different subfamilies occurred rapidly before the diploblast-triploblast split, accompanying with rapid amino acid substitutions. This type of gene duplication was, however, rarely observed after that split. Long after the subfamily divergence, another type of gene duplication that gave rise to diverse tissue-specific genes occurred in each subfamily on the chordate lineage since the separation from arthropods. This type of gene duplication occurred frequently before the fish-tetrapod split, accompanying with rapid amino acid substitutions. In contrast, both the frequency of gene duplications and the rate of the amino acid substitutions were considerably reduced after that split. These results strongly suggest that the PTKs diverged intermittently, but not gradually, during animal evolution.