ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2002
Origin of plant glycerol transporters by horizontal gene transfer and functional recruitment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2002. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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29 citing papers in PubMed, 88 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pan-plantae aquaporin evolution: insights intoHorticulture research · 2026Article
- Article
- Evolutionary and Structural Analysis of the Aquaporin Gene Family in Rice.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Early Diversification of Membrane Intrinsic Proteins (MIPs) in Eukaryotes.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Genomic diversity of aquaporins across genus Oryza provides a rich genetic resource for development of climate resilient rice cultivars.BMC plant biology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary Overview of Aquaporin Superfamily.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2023Article
- Structure and function of a silicic acid channel Lsi1.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Review
- Lineage-level divergence of copepod glycerol transporters and the emergence of isoform-specific trafficking regulation.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Horizontal Gene Transfer Involving Chloroplasts.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Highly Conserved Evolution of Aquaporin PIPs and TIPs Confers Their Crucial Contribution to Flowering Process in Plants.Frontiers in plant science · 2021Article
- Article
- Molecular and Functional Characterization of Grapevine NIPs through Heterologous Expression inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2020Article
- Phytolith Formation in Plants: From Soil to Cell.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
- Plant and Mammal Aquaporins: Same but Different.International journal of molecular sciences · 2018Review
- The Hevea brasiliensis XIP aquaporin subfamily: genomic, structural and functional characterizations with relevance to intensive latex harvesting.Plant molecular biology · 2016Article
- The Roles of Aquaporins in Plant Stress Responses.Journal of developmental biology · 2016Review
- Overexpression of a Barley Aquaporin Gene,Frontiers in plant science · 2016Article
- Four hundred million years of silica biomineralization in land plants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Prediction of aquaporin function by integrating evolutionary and functional analyses.The Journal of membrane biology · 2014Review
- A family of diatom-like silicon transporters in the siliceous loricate choanoflagellates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2013Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Gene-family evolution mostly relies on gene duplication coupled with functional diversification of gene products. However, other evolutionary mechanisms may also be important in generating protein diversity. The ubiquitous membrane intrinsic protein (MIP) gene family is an excellent model system to search for such alternative evolutionary mechanisms. MIPs are proteins that transport water, glycerol, and small solutes across cell membranes in all living organisms. We reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of MIPs based on amino acid sequence data by using neighbor-joining, maximum-likelihood, and Bayesian methods of phylogenetic inference. The recovered trees show an early and distinct separation of water and glycerol transporters, i.e., aquaporins (AQPs), and aquaglyceroporins. The latter are absent from plants. As expected, gene duplication and functional diversification account for most of the diversity of animal and plant members of the family. However, in contrast to this model, we find that the sister group of plant glycerol transporters are bacterial AQPs. This relationship suggests first that plant glycerol transporters may resulted from a single event of horizontal gene transfer from bacteria, which we have estimated to have occurred approximately 1,200 million years ago, at the origin of plants, and second that bacterial AQPs were likely recruited to transport glycerol in plants because of their absence of aquaglyceroporins. This striking example of adaptive evolution at the molecular level was demonstrated further by finding convergent or parallel replacements at particular amino acid positions related to water- and glycerol-transporting specificity.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.