ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2021
Contrasting Gene Decay in Subterranean Vertebrates: Insights from Cavefishes and Fossorial Mammals.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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26 citing papers in PubMed, 88 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loss, persistence and reversal of phenotypic traits.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The visual system of the longest-living vertebrate, the Greenland shark.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Water Parameters and Hydrodynamics in Rivers and Caves HostingEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Rapid speciation of Chinese hypogean fishes driven by paleogeoclimatic and morphological adaptations.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Genomic signatures of subterranean lifestyle and ecological adaptation in Myospalax.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Convergent Evolution in Amblyopsid Cavefishes and the Age of Eastern North American Subterranean Ecosystems.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- A Splicing Mutation in mitfa is Involved in the Depigmentation of Cavefish Triplophysa rosa.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evolution of the Nonvisual and Visual Opsin Gene Repertoire in Ray-Finned Fishes.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Sporadic feeding regulates robust food entrainable circadian clocks in blind cavefish.iScience · 2024Article
- Gene loss and relaxed selection ofProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The 'in's and out's' of descending pain modulation from the rostral ventromedial medulla.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- The nature and distribution of putative non-functional alleles suggest only two independent events at the origins of Astyanax mexicanus cavefish populations.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Convergent genomic signatures associated with vertebrate viviparity.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Gene loss and relaxed selection ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- AlexandrusPS: A User-Friendly Pipeline for the Automated Detection of Orthologous Gene Clusters and Subsequent Positive Selection Analysis.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Genetic identification and reiterated captures suggest that theZoological research · 2023Article
- Mitochondrial phylogeography and molecular evolution of the rhodopsin visual pigment in troglobitic populations ofZoological research · 2023Article
- Parallel and convergent genomic changes underlie independent subterranean colonization across beetles.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Photoreceptor genes in a trechine beetle, Trechiama kuznetsovi, living in the upper hypogean zone.Zoological letters · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 12 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolution sometimes proceeds by loss, especially when structures and genes become dispensable after an environmental shift relaxes functional constraints. Subterranean vertebrates are outstanding models to analyze this process, and gene decay can serve as a readout. We sought to understand some general principles on the extent and tempo of the decay of genes involved in vision, circadian clock, and pigmentation in cavefishes. The analysis of the genomes of two Cuban species belonging to the genus Lucifuga provided evidence for the largest loss of eye-specific genes and nonvisual opsin genes reported so far in cavefishes. Comparisons with a recently evolved cave population of Astyanax mexicanus and three species belonging to the Chinese tetraploid genus Sinocyclocheilus revealed the combined effects of the level of eye regression, time, and genome ploidy on eye-specific gene pseudogenization. The limited extent of gene decay in all these cavefishes and the very small number of loss-of-function mutations per pseudogene suggest that their eye degeneration may not be very ancient, ranging from early to late Pleistocene. This is in sharp contrast with the identification of several vision genes carrying many loss-of-function mutations in ancient fossorial mammals, further suggesting that blind fishes cannot thrive more than a few million years in cave ecosystems.
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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.