Global environmental problems and advances in information technology have led to accelerated evolution in industrial products and intensification of international competition.
We are pursuing an integrated strategy that synthesizes maps of human-specific accelerated evolution in noncoding DNAs, in vivo analysis of cis-regulatory elements, and functional genomic atlases of human development to reveal the genetic basis of unique human biology.
Here, we show that several amino acids on the surface of the JC virus capsid protein VP1 display accelerated evolution in viral sequences isolated from PML patients but not in sequences isolated from healthy subjects.
Hearing genes that have evolved rapidly in humans also show accelerated evolution in gorillas.
The team also found that certain genes that appear to have undergone accelerated evolution in the human line, including some related to brain function, have also undergone accelerated evolution in the dog.
Researchers have long assumed that these dramatic transitions resulted in a sort of accelerated evolution in which genes for traits such as skin color and stature changed rapidly to allow humans to survive in their new habitats.
Thus, an important contribution of accelerated evolution in the Myotragus genome cannot be discarded.
Although FoxP2 has clearly undergone accelerated evolution in bats compared to other vertebrates, the basis for this change is not clear.
Population size reduction is likely to affect all genes, but our results indicated accelerated evolution in only one of the five tested genes.
These conflicts with the species tree appear to stem from accelerated evolution in these groups, both of which inhabit low light environments.
To determine whether the rhodopsin gene has undergone accelerated evolution in mammal species that are adapted to low light conditions, we derived maximum-likelihood estimates of the rate of non-synonymous substitutions (dN) and the rate of synonymous substitutions (dS) using the CODEML program in PAML version 4 [64].
