Convergent Balancing Selection on an Antimicrobial Peptide in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: Genes of the immune system often evolve rapidly and adaptively, presumably driven by antagonistic interactions with pathogens [1-4]. Those genes encoding secreted antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), however, have failed to exhibit conventional signatures of strong adaptive evolution, especially in arthropods (e.g., [5, 6]) and often segregate for null alleles and gene deletions [3, 4, 7, 8]. Furthermore, quantitative genetic studies have failed to associate naturally occurring polymorphism in AMP genes with variation in resistance to infection [9-11]. Both the lack of signatures of positive selection in AMPs and lack of association between genotype and immune phenotypes have yielded an interpretation that AMP genes evolve under relaxed evolutionary constraint, with enough functional redundancy

SUBMITTER: Unckless RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4729654 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature