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Comparative Study
. 2006 Sep;174(1):411-20.
doi: 10.1534/genetics.106.057414. Epub 2006 Jul 2.

No accelerated rate of protein evolution in male-biased Drosophila pseudoobscura genes

Muralidhar Metta  1 , Rambabu Gudavalli, Jean-Michel Gibert, Christian Schlötterer
Affiliations
Comparative Study

No accelerated rate of protein evolution in male-biased Drosophila pseudoobscura genes

Muralidhar Metta et al. Genetics. 2006 Sep.

Abstract

Sexually dimorphic traits are often subject to diversifying selection. Genes with a male-biased gene expression also are probably affected by sexual selection and have a high rate of protein evolution. We used SAGE to measure sex-biased gene expression in Drosophila pseudoobscura. Consistent with previous results from D. melanogaster, a larger number of genes were male biased (402 genes) than female biased (138 genes). About 34% of the genes changed the sex-related expression pattern between D. melanogaster and D. pseudoobscura. Combining gene expression with protein divergence between both species, we observed a striking difference in the rate of evolution for genes with a male-biased gene expression in one species only. Contrary to expectations, D. pseudoobscura genes in this category showed no accelerated rate of protein evolution, while D. melanogaster genes did. If sexual selection is driving molecular evolution of male-biased genes, our data imply a radically different selection regime in D. pseudoobscura.

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Figures

F<sc>igure</sc> 1.—
Figure 1.—
Number of male- and female-biased tags based on different levels of significance (Fisher's exact test).
F<sc>igure</sc> 2.—
Figure 2.—
Gene expression of D. pseudoobscura males and females measured by SAGE tag counts. The open diamonds indicate SAGE tags that differ significantly (P ≤ 0.05, Fisher's exact test) between both sexes. The diamonds above the diagonal are male biased and below the diagonal are female biased. Shaded crosses indicate unbiased tags. A value of −1 was assigned to tags with no counts for one of the sexes.
F<sc>igure</sc> 3.—
Figure 3.—
Density of male-biased, female-biased, and unbiased genes on (A) chromosomes XL and XR and the autosomes in D. pseudoobscura and on (B) the X chromosome and autosomes in D. melanogaster.
F<sc>igure</sc> 3.—
Figure 3.—
Density of male-biased, female-biased, and unbiased genes on (A) chromosomes XL and XR and the autosomes in D. pseudoobscura and on (B) the X chromosome and autosomes in D. melanogaster.
F<sc>igure</sc> 4.—
Figure 4.—
Average dN values between D. melanogaster and D. pseudoobscura at different significance level cutoffs. MM, genes with male-biased expression in both species; MU, genes with male-biased expression in D. pseudoobscura and unbiased expression in D.melanogaster; UM, genes with unbiased expression in D. pseudoobscura and male-biased expression in D. melanogaster.
F<sc>igure</sc> 5.—
Figure 5.—
Mean dN value of genes with unbiased gene expression in D. pseudoobscura and male-biased gene expression in D. melanogaster (solid line). The x-axis gives the proportion of genes with low dN value that were deleted from the full data set. Note that the genes were sorted according to dN value and iteratively the gene with the lowest dN value was removed. The dashed line provides the mean dN value for genes with a male-biased gene expression in both species (no genes were deleted).
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