Baby Genomics: Tracing the Evolutionary Changes That Gave Rise to Placentation.

ABSTRACT: It has long been challenging to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind striking morphological innovations such as mammalian pregnancy. We studied the power of a robust comparative orthology pipeline based on gene synteny to address such problems. We inferred orthology relations between human genes and genes from each of 43 other vertebrate genomes, resulting in ∼18,000 orthologous pairs for each genome comparison. By identifying genes that first appear coincident with origin of the placental mammals, we hypothesized that we would define a subset of the genome enriched for genes that played a role in placental evolution. We thus pinpointed orthologs that appeared before and after the divergence of eutherian mammals from marsupials. Reinforcing previous work, we found instead that much of t

SUBMITTER: Hao Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7144826 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature