Evolution and turnover of seminal proteins in Drosophila
Despite being produced by the male, seminal fluid proteins (SFPs) act inside the female, where they exert striking effects on her. While these effects are fairly conserved among Diptera, the set of genes encoding SFPs exhibit remarkable evolutionary lability: sequences evolve rapidly and gene turnover (gain and loss) rates are high.
Consequently, most SFPs lack detectable homologs among the repertoire of SFPs of phylogenetically distant species. How such a rapidly changing proteome "manages" to conserve functions across taxa is a fascinating question from an evolutionary perspective. However, this and other pivotal aspects of SFPs' evolution remain elusive because discoveries on these proteins have been mainly restricted to the model D. melanogaster. It is ignored, for instance, whether a core of SFPs playing conserved essential roles are shared among dipteran species, how new SFP-coding genes arise or how conserved their regulatory elements are among species.
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Aimed to capitalize on the accumulated knowledge in D. melanogaster for addressing paramount open questions on the evolution of SFPs, we are identifying SFPs in non-model Drosophila species, combing dispersed data from multiple species into a centralized database, and performing molecular evolutionary analyses. We hope our update establishes a starting point to integrate, as more species are assayed for SFPs, further data and thus, widen the understanding of the intricate evolution of these proteins.
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