Molecular mechanisms underlying early functional divergence in snake venom inferred from the genomes of two pitviper lineages.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The molecular mechanisms that underlie adaptive divergence in complex traits can be assessed in traits like animal venoms where variation in gene sequence and expression levels can be directly linked to functional divergence in phenotypes. We used novel metrics for measuring functional divergence based on amino acid variation to assess the impact of coding sequence evolution, gene duplication and loss, and expression variation on the divergence in venom between sister species in two lineages of pitvipers.

Results

In both lineages, coding sequence and expression variation made significant contributions to overall functional divergence whereas genic variation was less important. Locus-specific analyses of two multigene families that encode important venom proteins (

SUBMITTER: Mason AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12752072 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature