Parasitic plants have increased rates of molecular evolution across all three genomes

Bromham, Lindell, Cowman, Peter F., and Lanfear, Robert (2013) Parasitic plants have increased rates of molecular evolution across all three genomes. Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, 13 (126). pp. 1-11.

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Abstract

Background: Theoretical models and experimental evidence suggest that rates of molecular evolution could be raised in parasitic organisms compared to non-parasitic taxa. Parasitic plants provide an ideal test for these predictions, as there are at least a dozen independent origins of the parasitic lifestyle in angiosperms. Studies of a number of parasitic plant lineages have suggested faster rates of molecular evolution, but the results of some studies have been mixed. Comparative analysis of all parasitic plant lineages, including sequences from all three genomes, is needed to examine the generality of the relationship between rates of molecular evolution and parasitism in plants.

Results: We analysed DNA sequence data from the mitochondrial, nuclear and chloroplast genomes for 12 independent evolutionary origins of parasitism in angiosperms. We demonstrated that parasitic lineages have a faster rate of molecular evolution than their non-parasitic relatives in sequences for all three genomes, for both synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions.

Conclusions: Our results prove that raised rates of molecular evolution are a general feature of parasitic plants, not confined to a few taxa or specific genes. We discuss possible causes for this relationship, including increased positive selection associated with host-parasite arms races, relaxed selection, reduced population size or repeated bottlenecks, increased mutation rates, and indirect causal links with generation time and body size. We find no evidence that faster rates are due to smaller effective populations sizes or changes in selection pressure. Instead, our results suggest that parasitic plants have a higher mutation rate than their close non-parasitic relatives. This may be due to a direct connection, where some aspect of the parasitic lifestyle drives the evolution of raised mutation rates. Alternatively, this pattern may be driven by an indirect connection between rates and parasitism: for example, parasitic plants tend to be smaller than their non-parasitic relatives, which may result in more cell generations per year, thus a higher rate of mutations arising from DNA copy errors per unit time. Demonstration that adoption of a parasitic lifestyle influences the rate of genomic evolution is relevant to attempts to infer molecular phylogenies of parasitic plants and to estimate their evolutionary divergence times using sequence data.

Item ID: 49191
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1538-8514
Keywords: mutation, substitution, comparative, population size, molecular rates
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© 2013 Bromham et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Research Data: http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.fc74k
Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2017 07:30
FoR Codes: 06 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 0603 Evolutionary Biology > 060309 Phylogeny and Comparative Analysis @ 30%
06 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 0604 Genetics > 060409 Molecular Evolution @ 40%
06 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 0607 Plant Biology > 060702 Plant Cell and Molecular Biology @ 30%
SEO Codes: 96 ENVIRONMENT > 9608 Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity > 960805 Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity at Regional or Larger Scales @ 50%
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