title: Both Male-Biased and Female-Biased Genes Evolve Faster in Fish Genomes.
abstract: Males and females often display extensive phenotypic differences, and many of these sexual dimorphisms are thought to result from differences between males and females in expression of genes present in both sexes. Sex-biased genes have been shown to exhibit accelerated rates of evolution in a wide array of species, however the cause of this remains enigmatic. In this study, we investigate the extent and evolutionary dynamics of sex-biased gene expression in zebrafish. Our results indicate that both male-biased genes and female-biased genes exhibit accelerated evolution at the protein level. In order to differentiate between adaptive and nonadaptive causes, we tested for codon usage bias and signatures of different selective regimes in our sequence data. Our results show that both male- and female-biased genes show signatures consistent with adaptive evolution. In order to test the generality of our findings across fish, we also analyzed publicly available data on sticklebacks, and found results consistent with our findings in zebrafish.
authors.affiliation: The Key Laboratory of Aquatic Biodiversity and Conservation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Liandong
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Zhaolei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: The Key Laboratory of Aquatic Biodiversity and Conservation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, People's Republic of China clad@ihb.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Shunping
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: He
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015982:Bias; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D059645:Mutation Rate; D015027:Zebrafish / Q000235:genetics; D029961:Zebrafish Proteins / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D029961:Zebrafish Proteins
keywords: adaptive evolution; sex-biased gene expression; sex-specific selection