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Evolutionary history of sexual differentiation mechanism in insects
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Gain of alternative splicing gives rise to functional diversity in proteins and underlies the complexity and diversity of biological aspects. However, it is still not fully understood how alternatively spliced genes develop the functional novelty. To this end, we infer the evolutionary history of the doublesex gene, the key transcriptional factor in the sexual differentiation of arthropods. doublesex is controlled by sex-specific splicing and promotes both male and female differentiation in some holometabolan insects. In contrast, doublesex promotes only male differentiation in some hemimetabolan insects. Here, we investigate ancestral states of doublesex using Thermobia domestica belonging to Zygentoma, the sister group of winged insects. We find that doublesex of T. domestica expresses sex-specific isoforms but is only necessary for male differentiation of sexual morphology. This result ensures the hypothesis that doublesex was initially only used to promote male differentiation during insect evolution. However, T. domestica doublesex has a short female-specific region and upregulates the expression of vitellogenin homologs in females, suggesting that doublesex may have already controlled some aspects of feminization in the common ancestor of winged insects. Reconstruction of the ancestral sequence and prediction of the protein structure show that the female-specific isoform of doublesex has a long C-terminal disordered region in holometabolan insects, but not in non-holometabolan species. We propose that doublesex acquired a female-specific isoform and then underwent a change in the protein motif structure, which became essential for female differentiation in sexual dimorphisms.
- Subjects :
- Male
Insecta
Sex Differentiation
animal structures
media_common.quotation_subject
Feminization (biology)
Doublesex
Insect
Genetics
Animals
Protein Isoforms
Molecular Biology
Gene
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
reproductive and urinary physiology
media_common
Sexual differentiation
biology
Alternative splicing
biology.organism_classification
Alternative Splicing
Evolutionary biology
RNA splicing
Insect Proteins
Female
Thermobia
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....f6800ce5876960c56a646a47c88511c4