title: Rapid Expansion of Immune-Related Gene Families in the House Fly, Musca domestica.
abstract: The house fly, Musca domestica, occupies an unusual diversity of potentially septic niches compared with other sequenced Dipteran insects and is a vector of numerous diseases of humans and livestock. In the present study, we apply whole-transcriptome sequencing to identify genes whose expression is regulated in adult flies upon bacterial infection. We then combine the transcriptomic data with analysis of rates of gene duplication and loss to provide insight into the evolutionary dynamics of immune-related genes. Genes up-regulated after bacterial infection are biased toward being evolutionarily recent innovations, suggesting the recruitment of novel immune components in the M. domestica or ancestral Dipteran lineages. In addition, using new models of gene family evolution, we show that several different classes of immune-related genes, particularly those involved in either pathogen recognition or pathogen killing, are duplicating at a significantly accelerated rate on the M. domestica lineage relative to other Dipterans. Taken together, these results suggest that the M. domestica immune response includes an elevated diversity of genes, perhaps as a consequence of its lifestyle in septic environments.
authors.affiliation: Informatics Group, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
authors.forename: Timothy B
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Sackton
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
authors.forename: Brian P
authors.initials: BP
authors.lastname: Lazzaro
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
authors.forename: Andrew G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Clark
mesh_terms: D056704:Adaptive Immunity / Q000235:genetics*; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence / Q000235:genetics; D017353:Gene Deletion; D020440:Gene Duplication / Q000235:genetics; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology; D014644:Genetic Variation / Q000235:genetics; D006793:Houseflies / Q000235:genetics*; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D059645:Mutation Rate; D059467:Transcriptome / Q000235:genetics
keywords: Dipterans; gene duplication; immunity; transcriptomics