Key Points
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Hypotheses about molecular evolution can be experimentally tested by resurrecting ancient genes and characterizing their functions.
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An ancient gene is resurrected by phylogenetically inferring its sequence, synthesizing and subcloning it into an expression vector and expressing it in cell culture.
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Maximum-likelihood methods for ancestral sequence reconstruction are an advance over previous methods because they are more accurate for very ancient sequences and they allow statistical confidence in the inference to be calculated at each sequence site.
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Recent studies using likelihood-based phylogenetics have resurrected genes that are far more ancient — up to one billion years old — than was previously possible.
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Ancestral sequence inference can be compromised by erroneous assumptions about the evolutionary process or the phylogenetic tree.
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Studies that use resurrected genes should critically evaluate statistical confidence in ancestral state inferences, with a particular focus on sites that are known to be functionally important.
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Errors in ancestral sequence reconstruction will usually — but not always — bias resurrected genes towards non-functionality.
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In the future, ancestral gene resurrection will be combined with site-directed mutagenesis and experimental evolution systems to determine the specific mechanisms and dynamics by which new protein functions have evolved.
Abstract
There are few molecular fossils: with the rare exception of DNA fragments preserved in amber, ice or peat, no physical remnants preserve the intermediate forms that existed during the evolution of today's genes. But ancient genes can now be reconstructed, expressed and functionally characterized, thanks to improved techniques for inferring and synthesizing ancestral sequences. This approach, known as 'ancestral gene resurrection', offers a powerful new way to empirically test hypotheses about the function of genes from the deep evolutionary past.
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Acknowledgements
I thank E. Gaucher, T. Dean, D. Hillis, J. Bull and L. Ancel Meyers for enlightening discussions and ideas. Two anonymous reviewers made very helpful suggestions on the manuscript. Supported in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
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DATABASES
Swiss-Prot
FURTHER INFORMATION
Introduction to phylogenetic inference
Peter Wilson's introduction to likelihood-based phylogenetics
Glossary
- BILATERIAN
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An animal that shows bilateral symmetry across a body axis. Bilaterians include chordates, arthropods, nematodes, annelids and molluscs, among other groups.
- ORTHOLOGUES
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The 'same' gene in more than one species. Orthologues descend from a speciation event.
- OUTGROUP SEQUENCES
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In phylogenetics, sequences that are known a priori to be more distantly related to the other sequences in the analysis (the ingroup sequences) than the ingroup sequences are to each other.
- CODON BIAS
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Preferential use of certain DNA codons over others that code for the same amino acid.
- BINDING ASSAYS
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A family of biochemical proceduers used to determine the affinity and specificity with which a protein binds a specific ligand or substrate.
- TELEOSTS
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The class of bony vertebrate fish with ray-like fins and symmetrical tails. It includes the vast majority of marine and freshwater bony fishes.
- PARSIMONY PRINCIPLE
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The principle that the best-supported evolutionary inference is the one that requires the fewest number of character changes. This criterion rests on the assumption that identical character states among closely related species are more likely to have descended from the same state in the species' common ancestor than to have evolved multiple times.
- ARTIODACTYL
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A member of the animal taxon that includes cows, sheep, pigs, giraffes, camels, oxes, whales, hippopotami and other two-toed hoofed mammals.
- LIKELIHOOD RATIO TEST
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A method for hypothesis testing in a likelihood framework. A data set's fit to a more complex model is compared with its fit to a simpler model using the likelihood ratio statistic (twice the ratio of the likelihoods of the two models). The more complex model is adopted if it increases the likelihood more than expected by chance at some critical probability. If the simpler model is a restricted version of the more complex model, the improvement in fit can be evaluated using a chi-square distribution.
- BAYESIAN METHOD
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In phylogenetics, a probabilistic technique for evaluating trees, evolutionary models and ancestral state assignments. Hypotheses are evaluated by their posterior probabilities.
- POSTERIOR PROBABILITY
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In Bayesian statistics, the probability that a hypothesis is true after the data have been analysed. The posterior probability is defined as the likelihood of the hypothesis multiplied by its prior probability, divided by the sum of the likelihood multiplied by the prior for all hypotheses.
- BAYESIAN MARKOV CHAIN MONTE CARLO [METHOD]
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A technique for efficient numerical calculation of Bayesian posterior probabilities.
- STEROID HORMONE RECEPTORS
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A phylogenetically related family of intracellular transcription factors that mediate the effects of oestrogens, androgens, progestins, glucocorticoids and mineralocorticoids on physiology and development.
- BRANCH SUPPORT
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A measure of support in a parsimony context for individual nodes in a phylogeny. The branch support — also known as the decay index or Bremer support — is the number of extra evolutionary changes that are required for a clade not to occur in the most parsimonious phylogeny.
- BOOTSTRAP PROPORTION
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A measure of support for individual nodes in a phylogeny. Sequence sites are sampled randomly with replacement from the original data set, and the optimal tree is inferred. This process is repeated many times, and the bootstrap proportion for a clade is the frequency of bootstrap replicates in which it occurs. A high bootstrap proportion indicates that the clade is not likely to be the result of sampling error in the sequence data.
- PAIRED-SITES TESTS
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A family of statistical methods for comparing two phylogenies as explanations of a data set. The difference in the log-likelihoods of the two trees is calculated separately for each sequence site. If one tree is a better fit to the data than the other, the mean of these differences will be significantly different from zero.
- EVOLUTIONARY RATE SHIFT
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A change among phylogenetic lineages in the substitution rate for a sequence site or set of sites.
- FITNESS LANDSCAPE
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A multidimensional plot that shows the fitness (on the vertical axis) for all possible variants of a sequence (occupying the horizontal axis, or sequence space).
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Thornton, J. Resurrecting ancient genes: experimental analysis of extinct molecules. Nat Rev Genet 5, 366–375 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1324
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1324
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