A functional enrichment test for molecular convergent evolution finds a clear protein-coding signal in echolocating bats and whales.

ABSTRACT: Distantly related species entering similar biological niches often adapt by evolving similar morphological and physiological characters. How much genomic molecular convergence (particularly of highly constrained coding sequence) contributes to convergent phenotypic evolution, such as echolocation in bats and whales, is a long-standing fundamental question. Like others, we find that convergent amino acid substitutions are not more abundant in echolocating mammals compared to their outgroups. However, we also ask a more informative question about the genomic distribution of convergent substitutions by devising a test to determine which, if any, of more than 4,000 tissue-affecting gene sets is most statistically enriched with convergent substitutions. We find that the gene set most overrepres

SUBMITTER: Marcovitz A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6800341 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature