The potential for adaptive maintenance of diversity in insect antimicrobial peptides.

ABSTRACT: Genes involved in immune defence are among the fastest evolving in the genomes of many species. Interestingly, however, genes encoding antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have shown little evidence for adaptive divergence in arthropods, despite the centrality of these peptides in direct killing of microbial pathogens. This observation, coupled with a failure to detect phenotypic consequence of genetic variation in AMPs, has led to the hypothesis that individual AMPs make minor contributions to overall immune defence and that AMPs instead act as a collective cocktail. Recent data, however, have suggested an alternative explanation for the apparent lack of adaptive divergence in AMP genes. Molecular evolutionary and phenotypic data have begun to suggest that variant AMP alleles may be maintained t

SUBMITTER: Unckless RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4874389 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature