Diversity and Evolution of Frog Visual Opsins: Spectral Tuning and Adaptation to Distinct Light Environments.

ABSTRACT: Visual systems adapt to different light environments through several avenues including optical changes to the eye and neurological changes in how light signals are processed and interpreted. Spectral sensitivity can evolve via changes to visual pigments housed in the retinal photoreceptors through gene duplication and loss, differential and coexpression, and sequence evolution. Frogs provide an excellent, yet understudied, system for visual evolution research due to their diversity of ecologies (including biphasic aquatic-terrestrial life cycles) that we hypothesize imposed different selective pressures leading to adaptive evolution of the visual system, notably the opsins that encode the protein component of the visual pigments responsible for the first step in visual perception. Here, we

SUBMITTER: Schott RK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10994157 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature