title: The evolution of genes for pigmentation in African cichlid fishes.
abstract: The cichlid fishes in the East African Great Lakes exhibit a great diversity of color patterns, presumably as adaptations to species-specific habitats and/or due to the action of sexual selection on color for species discrimination or female mate choice. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying such pigment pattern diversity, we cloned the cichlid homologs of tyrosinase, endothelin receptor b1, mitf, and Aim1 that previously had been cloned and characterized from pigmentation mutants of zebrafish and medaka fish. Gene sequence analysis among five cichlid species from the Great Lakes shows that the evolutionary rate of amino acid replacement in mitf is the highest of these four genes. We then compared the mitf amino acid replacement rates between species from the lacustrine and tilapiine/steatocranus lineages, and between Lake Malawi- and Victoria-haplochromine cichlids and Lake Tanganyika Lamprologini. We show that the evolutionary rate within the lacustrine lineage is twice that of the tilapiine/steatocranus lineage, but that rates for the Malawi-Victoria haplochromine and Lamprologini lineages are almost the same. These results suggest that the accelerated evolution of mitf might have occurred concomitantly with pigment pattern diversification in Great Lakes species, but not necessarily correlated with species under intense sexual selection on male mating color via female mate choice. Finally, we characterized a novel alternatively spliced variant of cichlid mitf that is similar to a mammalian mitf splice variant generated using alternate splice sites. We suggest that this new variant in cichlids, like that in mammals, encodes an MITF transcriptional factor having higher relative DNA binding affinity. These data provide a novel example of functional convergence in which a particular splice variant is independently generated via alternative splicing of a specific gene in different lineages.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259 Nagatsuta-cho, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8501, Japan.
authors.forename: Ayano
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sugie
authors.forename: Yohey
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Terai
authors.forename: Ryoko
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ota
authors.forename: Norihiro
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Okada
mesh_terms: D017398:Alternative Splicing; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D019943:Amino Acid Substitution; D023681:Cichlids / Q000235:genetics*; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D029941:Fish Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D051739:Microphthalmia-Associated Transcription Factor; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D014442:Monophenol Monooxygenase / Q000235:genetics; D010802:Phylogeny; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D044023:Receptor, Endothelin B / Q000235:genetics; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D013045:Species Specificity; D014157:Transcription Factors / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; D029941:Fish Proteins; D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins; D051739:Microphthalmia-Associated Transcription Factor; D012333:RNA, Messenger; D044023:Receptor, Endothelin B; D014157:Transcription Factors; D014442:Monophenol Monooxygenase