ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Ancient whale rhodopsin reconstructs dim-light vision over a major evolutionary transition: Implications for ancestral diving behavior.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolutionary Shifts in Rhodopsin Function Illuminate Dim-Light Adaptations in Birds.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Pressure-tolerant Evolution in Rhodopsin of Deep-diving Whales.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Visual pigments of basal lineages of bony fishes support independent ecological shifts from a shallow marine to a freshwater niche.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Comparative phenotypic analysis of rhodopsin supports stepwise evolution of dim-light vision in early vertebrates.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Dragonfly red opsins share a common tuning mechanism with mammalian red opsins and further enhancement of near-infrared sensitivity.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2026Article
- Seafloor video-acoustic monitoring in a Greenlandic glacial fjord records hyperbenthos, backward-swimming fish, and narwhals.PloS one · 2026Article
- Opsin gene expression plasticity and spectral sensitivity in male damselflies could mediate female colour morph detection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Why sequence the genome of every species? A view from evolutionary biology.Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom · 2025Article
- Parallel Spectral Tuning of a Cone Visual Pigment Provides Evidence for Ancient Deep-Sea Adaptations in Cetaceans.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Neuroanatomy of the Cetacean Sensory Systems.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Signatures of adaptation in myopia-related genes on the sunlight exposure hypothesis.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2023Article
- Convergent evolutionary shifts in rhodopsin retinal release explain shared opsin repertoires in monotremes and crocodilians.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Diversified Mammalian Visuasl Adaptations to Bright- or Dim-Light Environments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Ancient whale rhodopsin reconstructs dim-light vision over a major evolutionary transition: Implications for ancestral diving behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cetaceans are fully aquatic mammals that descended from terrestrial ancestors, an iconic evolutionary transition characterized by adaptations for underwater foraging via breath-hold diving. Although the evolutionary history of this specialized behavior is challenging to reconstruct, coevolving sensory systems may offer valuable clues. The dim-light visual pigment, rhodopsin, which initiates phototransduction in the rod photoreceptors of the eye, has provided insight into the visual ecology of depth in several aquatic vertebrate lineages. Here, we use ancestral sequence reconstruction and protein resurrection experiments to quantify light-activation metrics in rhodopsin pigments from ancestors bracketing the cetacean terrestrial-to-aquatic transition. By comparing multiple reconstruction methods on a broadly sampled cetartiodactyl species tree, we generated highly robust ancestral sequence estimates. Our experimental results provide direct support for a blue-shift in spectral sensitivity along the branch separating cetaceans from terrestrial relatives. This blue-shift was 14 nm, resulting in a deep-sea signature (λ
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