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      Characterization of a Nonclassical Class I MHC Gene in a Reptile, the Galápagos Marine Iguana ( Amblyrhynchus cristatus)

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          Abstract

          Squamates are a diverse order of vertebrates, representing more than 7,000 species. Yet, descriptions of full-length major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes in this group are nearly absent from the literature, while the number of MHC studies continues to rise in other vertebrate taxa. The lack of basic information about MHC organization in squamates inhibits investigation into the relationship between MHC polymorphism and disease, and leaves a large taxonomic gap in our understanding of amniote MHC evolution. Here, we use both cDNA and genomic sequence data to characterize a class I MHC gene ( Amcr-UA) from the Galápagos marine iguana, a member of the squamate subfamily Iguaninae. Amcr-UA appears to be functional since it is expressed in the blood and contains many of the conserved peptide-binding residues that are found in classical class I genes of other vertebrates. In addition, comparison of Amcr-UA to homologous sequences from other iguanine species shows that the antigen-binding portion of this gene is under purifying selection, rather than balancing selection, and therefore may have a conserved function. A striking feature of Amcr-UA is that both the cDNA and genomic sequences lack the transmembrane and cytoplasmic domains that are necessary to anchor the class I receptor molecule into the cell membrane, suggesting that the product of this gene is secreted and consequently not involved in classical class I antigen-presentation. The truncated and conserved character of Amcr-UA lead us to define it as a nonclassical gene that is related to the few available squamate class I sequences. However, phylogenetic analysis placed Amcr-UA in a basal position relative to other published classical MHC genes from squamates, suggesting that this gene diverged near the beginning of squamate diversification.

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          A large-scale analysis of mRNA polyadenylation of human and mouse genes

          mRNA polyadenylation is a critical cellular process in eukaryotes. It involves 3′ end cleavage of nascent mRNAs and addition of the poly(A) tail, which plays important roles in many aspects of the cellular metabolism of mRNA. The process is controlled by various cis-acting elements surrounding the cleavage site, and their binding factors. In this study, we surveyed genome regions containing cleavage sites [herein called poly(A) sites], for 13 942 human and 11 155 mouse genes. We found that a great proportion of human and mouse genes have alternative polyadenylation (∼54 and 32%, respectively). The conservation of alternative polyadenylation type or polyadenylation configuration between human and mouse orthologs is statistically significant, indicating that alternative polyadenylation is widely employed by these two species to produce alternative gene transcripts. Genes belonging to several functional groups, indicated by their Gene Ontology annotations, are biased with respect to polyadenylation configuration. Many poly(A) sites harbor multiple cleavage sites (51.25% human and 46.97% mouse sites), leading to heterogeneous 3′ end formation for transcripts. This implies that the cleavage process of polyadenylation is largely imprecise. Different types of poly(A) sites, with regard to their relative locations in a gene, are found to have distinct nucleotide composition in surrounding genomic regions. This large-scale study provides important insights into the mechanism of polyadenylation in mammalian species and represents a genomic view of the regulation of gene expression by alternative polyadenylation.
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            TREEFINDER: a powerful graphical analysis environment for molecular phylogenetics

            Background Most analysis programs for inferring molecular phylogenies are difficult to use, in particular for researchers with little programming experience. Results TREEFINDER is an easy-to-use integrative platform-independent analysis environment for molecular phylogenetics. In this paper the main features of TREEFINDER (version of April 2004) are described. TREEFINDER is written in ANSI C and Java and implements powerful statistical approaches for inferring gene tree and related analyzes. In addition, it provides a user-friendly graphical interface and a phylogenetic programming language. Conclusions TREEFINDER is a versatile framework for analyzing phylogenetic data across different platforms that is suited both for exploratory as well as advanced studies.
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              Evolution by the birth-and-death process in multigene families of the vertebrate immune system.

              Concerted evolution is often invoked to explain the diversity and evolution of the multigene families of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes and immunoglobulin (Ig) genes. However, this hypothesis has been controversial because the member genes of these families from the same species are not necessarily more closely related to one another than to the genes from different species. To resolve this controversy, we conducted phylogenetic analyses of several multigene families of the MHC and Ig systems. The results show that the evolutionary pattern of these families is quite different from that of concerted evolution but is in agreement with the birth-and-death model of evolution in which new genes are created by repeated gene duplication and some duplicate genes are maintained in the genome for a long time but others are deleted or become nonfunctional by deleterious mutations. We found little evidence that interlocus gene conversion plays an important role in the evolution of MHC and Ig multigene families.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2008
                6 August 2008
                : 3
                : 8
                : e2859
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
                [2 ]Institute of Zoology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
                American Museum of Natural History, United States of America
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: SG. Performed the experiments: SG. Analyzed the data: SG LdP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AC. Wrote the paper: SG.

                Article
                08-PONE-RA-03359R1
                10.1371/journal.pone.0002859
                2483932
                18682845
                a884bd1a-5eb8-4f88-abbe-d0b247123278
                Glaberman et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 18 January 2008
                : 24 June 2008
                Page count
                Pages: 11
                Categories
                Research Article
                Evolutionary Biology/Evolutionary and Comparative Genetics
                Immunology/Genetics of the Immune System
                Molecular Biology/Molecular Evolution

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