Journal
ELIFE
Volume 7, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.34226
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Funding
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Institutes of Health
- U.S. Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship
- National Science Foundation Central Europe Summer Research Institute Fellowship
- Chang-Lin Tien Fellowship in Environmental Sciences and Biodiversity
- Conseil Regional de Bretagne Postdoctoral Fellowship
- French Government Investissements d'Avenir OCEANOMICS [ANR-11-BTBR-0008]
- National Science Foundation EDEN IOS [0955517]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Integrative Organismal Systems [0955517] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Choanoflagellates, the closest living relatives of animals, can provide unique insights into the changes in gene content that preceded the origin of animals. However, only two choanoflagellate genomes are currently available, providing poor coverage of their diversity. We sequenced transcriptomes of 19 additional choanoflagellate species to produce a comprehensive reconstruction of the gains and losses that shaped the ancestral animal gene repertoire. We identified similar to 1944 gene families that originated on the animal stem lineage, of which only 39 are conserved across all animals in our study. In addition, similar to 372 gene families previously thought to be animal-specific, including Notch, Delta, and homologs of the animal Toll-like receptor genes, instead evolved prior to the animal-choanoflagellate divergence. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed portrait of the gene families that defined the biology of the Urmetazoan and that may underpin core features of extant animals.
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