Ancestral resurrection of anthropoid estrogen receptor β demonstrates functional consequences of positive selection.

ABSTRACT: Anthropoid primates arose during the Eocene approximately 55 million years ago (mya), and extant anthropoids share a most recent common ancestor ∼40mya. Paleontology has been very successful at describing the morphological phenotypes of extinct anthropoids. Less well understood is the molecular biology of these extinct species as well as the phenotypic consequences of evolutionary variation in their genomes. Here we resurrect the most recent common ancestral anthropoid estrogen receptor β gene (ESR2) and demonstrate that the function of this ancestral estrogen receptor has been maintained during human descent but was altered during early New World monkey (NWM) evolution by becoming a more potent transcriptional activator. We tested hypotheses of adaptive evolution in the protein coding seq

SUBMITTER: Weckle A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6071416 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature