Parasitic plants have increased rates of molecular evolution across all three genomes

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Robert Lanfear¹  Peter F Cowman¹  Lindell Bromham¹ 

[1] Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T, 0200, Australia

关键词: Molecular rates;    Population size;    Comparative;    Substitution;    Mutation;   

Others  :  1087067
DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-13-126

 received in 2013-03-21, accepted in 2013-06-05,  发布年份 2013

【 摘 要 】

Background

Theoretical models and experimental evidence suggest that rates of molecular evolution could be raised in parasitic organisms compared to non-parasitic taxa. Parasitic plants provide an ideal test for these predictions, as there are at least a dozen independent origins of the parasitic lifestyle in angiosperms. Studies of a number of parasitic plant lineages have suggested faster rates of molecular evolution, but the results of some studies have been mixed. Comparative analysis of all parasitic plant lineages, including sequences from all three genomes, is needed to examine the generality of the relationship between rates of molecular evolution and parasitism in plants.

Results

We analysed DNA sequence data from the mitochondrial, nuclear and chloroplast genomes for 12 independent evolutionary origins of parasitism in angiosperms. We demonstrated that parasitic lineages have a faster rate of molecular evolution than their non-parasitic relatives in sequences for all three genomes, for both synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions.

Conclusions

Our results prove that raised rates of molecular evolution are a general feature of parasitic plants, not confined to a few taxa or specific genes. We discuss possible causes for this relationship, including increased positive selection associated with host-parasite arms races, relaxed selection, reduced population size or repeated bottlenecks, increased mutation rates, and indirect causal links with generation time and body size. We find no evidence that faster rates are due to smaller effective populations sizes or changes in selection pressure. Instead, our results suggest that parasitic plants have a higher mutation rate than their close non-parasitic relatives. This may be due to a direct connection, where some aspect of the parasitic lifestyle drives the evolution of raised mutation rates. Alternatively, this pattern may be driven by an indirect connection between rates and parasitism: for example, parasitic plants tend to be smaller than their non-parasitic relatives, which may result in more cell generations per year, thus a higher rate of mutations arising from DNA copy errors per unit time. Demonstration that adoption of a parasitic lifestyle influences the rate of genomic evolution is relevant to attempts to infer molecular phylogenies of parasitic plants and to estimate their evolutionary divergence times using sequence data.

【 授权许可】

   
2013 Bromham et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

Figure 1.

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