The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution
Abstract
The discovery of a living coelacanth specimen in 1938 was
remarkable, as this lineage of lobe-finned fish was thought to have
become extinct 70million
years ago. The modern coelacanth looks remarkably similar to many of
its ancient relatives, and its evolutionary proximity to our own fish
ancestors provides a glimpse of the fish that first walked on land. Here
we report the genome sequence of the African coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.
Through a phylogenomic analysis, we conclude that the lungfish, and not
the coelacanth, is the closest living relative of tetrapods. Coelacanth
protein-coding genes are significantly more slowly evolving than those
of tetrapods, unlike other genomic features. Analyses of changes in
genes and regulatory elements during the vertebrate adaptation to land
highlight genes involved in immunity, nitrogen excretion and the
development of fins, tail, ear, eye, brain and olfaction. Functional
assays of enhancers involved in the fin-to-limb transition and in the
emergence of extra-embryonic tissues show the importance of the
coelacanth genome as a blueprint for understanding tetrapod evolution.
In 1938 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of a small
natural history museum in East London, South Africa, discovered a large,
unusual-looking fish among the many specimens delivered to her by a
local fish trawler. Latimeria chalumnae, named after its discoverer1, was over 1m
long, bluish in colour and had conspicuously fleshy fins that resembled
the limbs of terrestrial vertebrates. This discovery is considered to
be one of the most notable zoological finds of the twentieth century. Latimeria
is the only living member of an ancient group of lobe-finned fishes
that was known previously only from fossils and believed to have been
extinct since the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 70million years ago (Myr ago)1. It was almost 15years
before a second specimen of this elusive species was discovered in the
Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean, and only 309 individuals have been
recorded in the past 75years (R. Nulens, personal communication)2. The discovery in 1997 of a second coelacanth species in Indonesia, Latimeria menadoensis,
was equally surprising, as it had been assumed that living coelacanths
were confined to small populations off the East African coast3, 4.
Fascination with these fish is partly due to their prehistoric
appearance—remarkably, their morphology is similar to that of fossils
that date back at least 300Myr, leading to the supposition that, among vertebrates, this lineage is markedly slow to evolve1, 5. Latimeria
has also been of particular interest to evolutionary biologists, owing
to its hotly debated relationship to our last fish ancestor, the fish
that first crawled onto land6. In the past 15years, targeted sequencing efforts have produced the sequences of the coelacanth mitochondrial genomes7, HOX clusters8 and a few gene families9, 10.
Nevertheless, coelacanth research has felt the lack of large-scale
sequencing data. Here we describe the sequencing and comparative
analysis of the genome of L. chalumnae, the African coelacanth.
The African coelacanth genome was sequenced and assembled using DNA from a Comoros Islands Latimeria chalumnae specimen (Supplementary Fig. 1). It was sequenced by Illumina sequencing technology and assembled using the short read genome assembler ALLPATHS-LG11. The L. chalumnae genome has been reported previously to have a karyotype of 48chromosomes12. The draft assembly is 2.86gigabases (Gb) in size and is composed of 2.18Gb
of sequence plus gaps between contigs. The coelacanth genome assembly
has a contig N50 size (the contig size above which 50% of the total
length of the sequence assembly can be found) of 12.7kilobases (kb) and a scaffold N50 size of 924kb, and quality metrics comparable to other Illumina genomes (Supplementary Note 1, and Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).
The
genome assembly was annotated separately by both the Ensembl gene
annotation pipeline (Ensembl release 66, February 2012) and by MAKER13.
The Ensembl gene annotation pipeline created gene models using protein
alignments from the Universal Protein Resource (Uniprot) database,
limited coelacanth complementary DNA data, RNA-seq data generated from L. chalumnae muscle (18Gb of paired-end reads were assembled using Trinity software14, Supplementary Fig. 2)
as well as orthology with other vertebrates. This pipeline produced
19,033 protein-coding genes containing 21,817 transcripts. The MAKER
pipeline used the L. chalumnae Ensembl gene set, Uniprot protein alignments, and L. chalumnae (muscle) and L. menadoensis (liver and testis)15
RNA-seq data to create gene models, and this produced 29,237
protein-coding gene annotations. In addition, 2,894 short non-coding
RNAs, 1,214 long non-coding RNAs, and more than 24,000 conserved RNA
secondary structures were identified (Supplementary Note 2, Supplementary Tables 3 and 4, Supplementary Data 1–3 and Supplementary Fig. 3). It was inferred that 336genes underwent specific duplications in the coelacanth lineage (Supplementary Note 3, Supplementary Tables 5 and 6, and Supplementary Data 4).
The question of which living fish is the closest relative to ‘the
fish that first crawled on to land’ has long captured our imagination:
among scientists the odds have been placed on either the lungfish or the
coelacanth16. Analyses of small to moderate amounts of sequence data for this important phylogenetic question (ranging from 1to 43genes) has tended to favour the lungfishes as the extant sister group to the land vertebrates17.
However, the alternative hypothesis that the lungfish and the
coelacanth are equally closely related to the tetrapods could not be
rejected with previous data sets18.
To
seek a comprehensive answer we generated RNA-seq data from three
samples (brain, gonad and kidney, and gut and liver) from the West
African lungfish, Protopterus annectens, and compared it to gene sets from 21strategically chosen jawed vertebrate species. To perform a reliable analysis we selected 251genes
in which a 1:1 orthology ratio was clear and used CAT-GTR, a complex
site-heterogeneous model of sequence evolution that is known to reduce
tree-reconstruction artefacts19 (see Supplementary Methods). The resulting phylogeny, based on 100,583 concatenated amino acid positions (Fig. 1,
posterior probability = 1.0 for the lungfish–tetrapod node) is
maximally supported except for the relative positions of the armadillo
and the elephant. It corroborates known vertebrate phylogenetic
relationships and strongly supports the conclusion that tetrapods are
more closely related to lungfish than to the coelacanth (Supplementary Note 4 and Supplementary Fig. 4).
Figure 1: A phylogenetic tree of a broad selection of jawed
vertebrates shows that lungfish, not coelacanth, is the closest relative
of tetrapods.
Multiple sequence alignments of 251genes with a 1:1 ratio of orthologues in 22vertebrates
and with a full sequence coverage for both lungfish and coelacanth were
used to generate a concatenated matrix of 100,583 unambiguously aligned
amino acid positions. The Bayesian tree was inferred using PhyloBayes
under the CAT+GTR+Γ4
model with confidence estimates derived from 100 gene jack-knife
replicates (support is 100% for all clades but armadillo + elephant with
45%)48.
The tree was rooted on cartilaginous fish, and shows that the lungfish
is more closely related to tetrapods than the coelacanth, and that the
protein sequence of coelacanth is evolving slowly. Pink lines
(tetrapods) are slightly offset from purple lines (lobe-finned fish), to
indicate that these species are both tetrapods and lobe-finned fish.
The morphological resemblance of the modern coelacanth to its
fossil ancestors has resulted in it being nicknamed ‘the living fossil’1.
This invites the question of whether the genome of the coelacanth is as
slowly evolving as its outward appearance suggests. Earlier work showed
that a few gene families, such as Hox and protocadherins, have
comparatively slower protein-coding evolution in coelacanth than in
other vertebrate lineages8, 10. To address the question, we compared several features of the coelacanth genome to those of other vertebrate genomes.
Protein-coding gene evolution was examined using the phylogenomics data set described above (251 concatenated proteins) (Fig. 1).
Pair-wise distances between taxa were calculated from the branch
lengths of the tree using the two-cluster test proposed previously20
to test for equality of average substitution rates. Then, for each of
the following species and species clusters (coelacanth, lungfish,
chicken and mammals), we ascertained their respective mean distance to
an outgroup consisting of three cartilaginous fishes (elephant shark,
little skate and spotted catshark). Finally, we tested whether there was
any significant difference in the distance to the outgroup of
cartilaginous fish for every pair of species and species clusters, using
a Z statistic. When these distances to the outgroup of
cartilaginous fish were compared, we found that the coelacanth proteins
that were tested were significantly more slowly evolving (0.890
substitutions per site) than the lungfish (1.05 substitutions per site),
chicken (1.09 substitutions per site) and mammalian (1.21 substitutions
per site) orthologues (P<10−6 in all cases) (Supplementary Data 5). In addition, as can be seen in Fig. 1,
the substitution rate in coelacanth is approximately half that in
tetrapods since the two lineages diverged. A Tajima’s relative rate test21 confirmed the coelacanth’s significantly slower rate of protein evolution (P<10−20) (Supplementary Data 6).
We
next examined the abundance of transposable elements in the coelacanth
genome. Theoretically, transposable elements may make their greatest
contribution to the evolution of a species by generating templates for
exaptation to form novel regulatory elements and exons, and by acting as
substrates for genomic rearrangement22.
We found that the coelacanth genome contains a wide variety of
transposable-element superfamilies and has a relatively high
transposable-element content (25%); this number is probably an
underestimate as this is a draft assembly (Supplementary Note 5 and Supplementary Tables 7–10).
Analysis of RNA-seq data and of the divergence of individual
transposable-element copies from consensus sequences show that 14coelacanth transposable-element superfamilies are currently active (Supplementary Note 6, Supplementary Table 10 and Supplementary Fig. 5).
We conclude that the current coelacanth genome shows both an abundance
and activity of transposable elements similar to many other genomes.
This contrasts with the slow protein evolution observed.
Analyses
of chromosomal breakpoints in the coelacanth genome and tetrapod genomes
reveal extensive conservation of synteny and indicate that large-scale
rearrangements have occurred at a generally low rate in the coelacanth
lineage. Analyses of these rearrangement classes detected several
fission events published previously23 that are known to have occurred in tetrapod lineages, and at least 31interchromosomal rearrangements that occurred in the coelacanth lineage or the early tetrapod lineage (0.063 fusions per 1Myr), compared to 20events (0.054 fusionsper 1Myr) in the salamander lineage and 21events (0.057 fusions per 1Myr) in the Xenopus lineage23 (Supplementary Note 7 and Supplementary Fig. 6).
Overall, these analyses indicate that karyotypic evolution in the
coelacanth lineage has occurred at a relatively slow rate, similar to
that of non-mammalian tetrapods24.
In a separate analysis we also examined the evolutionary divergence between the two species of coelacanth, L. chalumnae and L. menadoensis,
found in African and Indonesian waters, respectively. Previous analysis
of mitochondrial DNA showed a sequence identity of 96%, but estimated
divergence times range widely from 6to 40Myr25, 26. When we compared the liver and testis transcriptomes of L. menadoensis27 to the L. chalumnae genome, we found an identity of 99.73% (Supplementary Note 8 and Supplementary Fig. 7), whereas alignments between 20sequenced L. menadoensis bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and the L. chalumnae genome showed an identity of 98.7% (Supplementary Table 11 and Supplementary Fig. 8).
Both the genic and genomic divergence rates are similar to those seen
between the human and chimpanzee genomes (99.5% and 98.8%, respectively;
divergence time of 6to 8Myr ago)28, whereas the rates of molecular evolution in Latimeria
are probably affected by several factors, including the slower
substitution rate seen in coelacanth. This suggests a slightly longer
divergence time for the two coelacanth species.
As the species with a sequenced genome closest to our most recent
aquatic ancestor, the coelacanth provides a unique opportunity to
identify genomic changes that were associated with the successful
adaptation of vertebrates to the land environment.
Over the 400Myr
that vertebrates have lived on land, some genes that are unnecessary
for existence in their new environment have been eliminated. To
understand this aspect of the water-to-land transition, we surveyed the Latimeria
genome annotations to identify genes that were present in the last
common ancestor of all bony fish (including the coelacanth) but that are
missing from tetrapod genomes. More than 50such
genes, including components of fibroblast growth factor (FGF)
signalling, TGF-β and bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signalling, and WNT
signalling pathways, as well as many transcription factor genes, were
inferred to be lost based on the coelacanth data (Supplementary Data 7 and Supplementary Fig. 9).
Previous studies of genes that were lost in this transition could only
compare teleost fish to tetrapods, meaning that differences in gene
content could have been due to loss in the tetrapod or in the
lobe-finned fish lineages. We were able to confirm that four genes that
were shown previously to be absent in tetrapods (And1 and And2 (ref. 29), Fgf24 (ref. 30) and Asip2 (ref. 31)), were indeed present and intact in Latimeria, supporting the idea that they were lost in the tetrapod lineage.
We functionally annotated more than 50genes
lost in tetrapods using zebrafish data (gene expression, knock-downs
and knockouts). Many genes were classified in important developmental
categories (Supplementary Data 7): fin development (13genes); otolith and ear development (8genes); kidney development (7genes); trunk, somite and tail development (11genes); eye (13genes); and brain development (23genes).
This implies that critical characters in the morphological transition
from water to land (for example, fin-to-limb transition and remodelling
of the ear) are reflected in the loss of specific genes along the
phylogenetic branch leading to tetrapods. However, homeobox genes, which
are responsible for the development of an organism’s basic body plan,
show only slight differences between Latimeria, ray-finned fish and tetrapods; it would seem that the protein-coding portion of this gene family, along with several others (Supplementary Note 9, Supplementary Tables 12–16 and Supplementary Fig. 10), have remained largely conserved during the vertebrate land transition (Supplementary Fig. 11).
As
vertebrates transitioned to a new land environment, changes occurred
not only in gene content but also in the regulation of existing genes.
Conserved non-coding elements (CNEs) are strong candidates for gene
regulatory elements. They can act as promoters, enhancers, repressors
and insulators32, 33, and have been implicated as major facilitators of evolutionary change34.
To identify CNEs that originated in the most recent common ancestor of
tetrapods, we predicted CNEs that evolved in various bony vertebrate
(that is, ray-finned fish, coelacanth and tetrapod) lineages and
assigned them to their likely branch points of origin. To detect CNEs,
conserved sequences in the human genome were identified using MULTIZ
alignments of bony vertebrate genomes, and then known protein-coding
sequences, untranslated regions (UTRs) and known RNA genes were
excluded. Our analysis identified 44,200 ancestral tetrapod CNEs that
originated after the divergence of the coelacanth lineage. They
represent 6% of the 739,597 CNEs that are under constraint in the bony
vertebrate lineage. We compared the ancestral tetrapod CNEs to mouse
embryo ChIP-seq (chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing)
data obtained using antibodies against p300, a transcriptional
coactivator. This resulted in a sevenfold enrichment in the p300 binding
sites for our candidate CNEs and confirmed that these CNEs are indeed
enriched for gene regulatory elements.
Each tetrapod CNE was
assigned to the gene whose transcription start site was closest, and
gene-ontology category enrichment was calculated for those genes. The
most enriched categories were involved with smell perception (for
example, sensory perception of smell, detection of chemical stimulus and
olfactory receptor activity). This is consistent with the notable
expansion of olfactory receptor family genes in tetrapods compared with
teleosts, and may reflect the necessity of a more tightly regulated,
larger and more diverse repertoire of olfactory receptors for detecting
airborne odorants as part of the terrestrial lifestyle. Other
significant categories include morphogenesis (radial pattern formation,
hind limb morphogenesis, kidney morphogenesis) and cell differentiation
(endothelial cell fate commitment, epithelial cell fate commitment),
which is consistent with the body-plan changes required for land
transition, as well as immunoglobulin VDJ recombination, which reflects
the presumed response differences required to address the novel
pathogens that vertebrates would encounter on land (Supplementary Note 10 and Supplementary Tables 17–24).
A
major innovation of tetrapods is the evolution of limbs characterized
by digits. The limb skeleton consists of a stylopod (humerus or femur),
the zeugopod (radius and ulna, or tibia and fibula), and an autopod
(wrist or ankle, and digits). There are two major hypotheses about the
origins of the autopod; that it was a novel feature of tetrapods, and
that it has antecedents in the fins of fish35 (Supplementary Note 11 and Supplementary Fig. 12).
We examine here the Hox regulation of limb development in ray-finned
fish, coelacanth and tetrapods to address these hypotheses.
In mouse, late-phase digit enhancers are located in a gene desert that is proximal to the HOX-D cluster36.
Here we provide an alignment of the HOX-D centromeric gene desert of
coelacanth with those of tetrapods and ray-finned fishes (Fig. 2a). Among the six cis-regulatory sequences previously identified in this gene desert36, three sequences show sequence conservation restricted to tetrapods (Supplementary Fig. 13). However, one regulatory sequence (island 1) is shared by tetrapods and coelacanth, but not by ray-finned fish (Fig. 2b and Supplementary Fig. 14).
When tested in a transient transgenic assay in mouse, the coelacanth
sequence of island 1 was able to drive reporter expression in a
limb-specific pattern (Fig. 2c).
This suggests that island 1 was a lobe-fin developmental enhancer in
the fish ancestor of tetrapods that was then coopted into the autopod
enhancer of modern tetrapods. In this case, the autopod developmental
regulation was derived from an ancestral lobe-finned fish regulatory
element.
Figure 2: Alignment of the HOX-D locus and an upstream gene desert identifies conserved limb enhancers.
a, Organization of the mouse HOX-D locus and centromeric gene desert, flanked by the Atf2 and Mtx2
genes. Limb regulatory sequences (I1, I2, I3, I4, CsB and CsC) are
noted. Using the mouse locus as a reference (NCBI and mouse genome
sequencing consortium NCBI37/mm9 assembly), corresponding sequences from
human, chicken, frog, coelacanth, pufferfish, medaka, stickleback,
zebrafish and elephant shark were aligned. Alignment shows regions of
homology between tetrapod, coelacanth and ray-finned fishes. b, Alignment of vertebrate cis-regulatory elements I1, I2, I3, I4, CsB and CsC. c,
Expression patterns of coelacanth island I in a transgenic mouse. Limb
buds are indicated by arrowheads in the first two panels. The third
panel shows a close-up of a limb bud.
Changes in the urea cycle provide an illuminating example of the
adaptations associated with transition to land. Excretion of nitrogen is
a major physiological challenge for terrestrial vertebrates. In aquatic
environments, the primary nitrogenous waste product is ammonia, which
is readily diluted by surrounding water before it reaches toxic levels,
but on land, less toxic substances such as urea or uric acid must be
produced instead (Supplementary Fig. 15).
The widespread and almost exclusive occurrence of urea excretion in
amphibians, some turtles and mammals has led to the hypothesis that the
use of urea as the main nitrogenous waste product was a key innovation
in the vertebrate transition from water to land37.
With
the availability of gene sequences from coelacanth and lungfish, it
became possible to test this hypothesis. We used a branch-site model in
the HYPHY package38, which estimates the ratio of synonymous (dS) to non-synonymous (dN) substitutions (ω
values) among different branches and among different sites (codons)
across a multiple-species sequence alignment. For the rate-limiting
enzyme of the hepatic urea cycle, carbamoyl phosphate synthase I (CPS1),
only one branch of the tree shows a strong signature of selection (P = 0.02), namely the branch leading to tetrapods and the branch leading to amniotes (Fig. 3);
no other enzymes in this cycle showed a signature of selection.
Conversely, mitochondrial arginase (ARG2), which produces extrahepatic
urea as a byproduct of arginine metabolism but is not involved in the
production of urea for nitrogenous waste disposal, did not show any
evidence of selection in vertebrates (Supplementary Fig. 16).
This leads us to conclude that adaptive evolution occurred in the
hepatic urea cycle during the vertebrate land transition. In addition,
it is interesting to note that of the five amino acids of CPS1 that
changed between coelacanth and tetrapods, three are in important domains
(the two ATP-binding sites and the subunit interaction domain) and a
fourth is known to cause a malfunctioning enzyme in human patients if
mutated39.
Figure 3: Phylogeny of Cps1 coding sequences is used to determine positive selection within the urea cycle.
Branch lengths are scaled to the
expected number of substitutions per nucleotide, and branch colours
indicate the strength of selection (dN/dS or ω). Red, positive or diversifying selection (ω>5); blue, purifying selection (ω = 0); yellow, neutral evolution (ω
= 1). Thick branches indicate statistical support for evolution under
episodic diversifying selection. The proportion of each colour
represents the fraction of the sequence undergoing the corresponding
class of selection.
The adaptation to a terrestrial lifestyle necessitated major changes
in the physiological environment of the developing embryo and fetus,
resulting in the evolution and specialization of extra-embryonic
membranes of the amniote mammals40.
In particular, the placenta is a complex structure that is critical for
providing gas and nutrient exchange between mother and fetus, and is
also a major site of haematopoiesis41.
We
have identified a region of the coelacanth HOX-A cluster that may have
been involved in the evolution of extra-embryonic structures in
tetrapods, including the eutherian placenta. Global alignment of the
coelacanth Hoxa14–Hoxa13 region with the homologous regions of the horn shark, chicken, human and mouse revealed a CNE just upstream of the coelacanth Hoxa14 gene (Supplementary Fig. 17a).
This conserved stretch is not found in teleost fishes but is highly
conserved among horn shark, chicken, human and mouse despite the fact
that the chicken, human and mouse have no Hoxa14 orthologues, and that the horn shark Hoxa14 gene has become a pseudogene. This CNE, HA14E1, corresponds to the proximal promoter-enhancer region of the Hoxa14 gene in Latimeria.
HA14E1 is more than 99% identical between mouse, human and all other
sequenced mammals, and would therefore be considered to be an
ultra-conserved element42.
The high level of conservation suggests that this element, which
already possessed promoter activity, may have been coopted for other
functions despite the loss of the Hoxa14 gene in amniotes (Supplementary Fig. 17bc). Expression of human HA14E1 in a mouse transient transgenic assay did not give notable expression in the embryo proper at day11.5 (information is available online at the VISTA enhancer browser website; http://enhancer.lbl.gov/cgi-bin/imagedb3.pl?form=presentation&show=1&experiment_id=501&organism_id=1), which was unexpected as its location would predict that it would regulate axial structures caudally43.
A similar experiment in chick embryos using the chicken HA14E1 also
showed no activity in the anteroposterior axis. However, strong
expression was observed in the extraembryonic area vasculosa of the
chick embryo (Fig. 4a). Examination of a Latimeria BAC Hoxa14-reporter transgene in mouse embryos showed that the Hoxa14 gene is specifically expressed in a subset of cells in an extra-embryonic region at embryonic day8.5 (Fig. 4b).
Figure 4: Transgenic analysis implicates involvement of Hox CNE HA14E1 in extraembryonic activities in the chick and mouse.
a, Chicken HA14E1 drives reporter
expression in blood islands in chick embryos. A construct containing
chicken HA14E1 upstream of a minimal (thymidine kinase) promoter driving
enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) was electroporated in
HH4-stage chick embryos together with a nuclear mCherry construct. GFP
expression was analysed at stage approximately HH11. The green
aggregations and punctate staining are observed in the blood islands and
developing vasculature. b, Expression of Latimeria Hoxa14-reporter
transgene in the developing placental labyrinth of a mouse embryo. A
field of cells from the labyrinth region of an embryo at embryonic day8.5 from a BAC transgenic line containing coelacanth Hoxa9–Hoxa14 (ref. 49) in which the Hoxa14
gene had been supplanted with the gene for red fluorescence protein
(RFP). Immunohistochemistry was used to detect RFP (brown staining in a
small number of cells).
These findings suggest that the HA14E1 region may have been
evolutionarily recruited to coordinate regulation of posterior HOX-A
genes (Hoxa13, Hoxa11 and Hoxa10), which are known to be expressed in the mouse allantois and are critical for early formation of the mammalian placenta44. Although Latimeria does not possess a placenta, it gives birth to live young and has very large, vascularised eggs, but the relationship between Hoxa14, the HA14E1 enhancer and blood island formation in the coelacanth remains unknown.
Immunoglobulin-M (IgM), a class of antibodies, has been reported
in all vertebrate species that have been characterized so far, and is
considered to be indispensable for adaptive immunity45.
Interestingly, IgM genes cannot be found in coelacanth, despite an
exhaustive search of the coelacanth sequence data, and even though all
other major components of the immune system are present (Supplementary Note 12 and Supplementary Fig. 18). Instead, we found two IgW genes (Supplementary Figs 19–21);
immunoglobulin genes that are found only in lungfish and cartilaginous
fish and are believed to have originated in the ancestor of jawed
vertebrates46 but subsequently lost in teleosts and tetrapods. IgM was similarly absent from the Latimeria
RNA-seq data, although both IgW genes were found as transcripts. To
characterize further the apparent absence of IgM, we screened large
genomic L. menadoensis libraries exhaustively using a number of
strategies and probes. We also carried out polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) with degenerate primers that should universally amplify IgM
sequences. The lack of IgM in Latimeria raises questions as to how coelacanth Bcells
respond to microbial pathogens and whether the IgW molecules can serve a
compensatory function, even though there is no indication that the
coelacanth IgW was derived from vertebrate IgM genes.
Since its discovery, the coelacanth has been referred to as a
‘living fossil’, owing to its morphological similarities to its fossil
ancestors1.
However, questions have remained as to whether it is indeed evolving
slowly, as morphological stasis does not necessarily imply genomic
stasis. In this study, we have confirmed that the protein-coding genes
of L. chalumnae show a decreased substitution rate compared to
those of other sequenced vertebrates, even though its genome as a whole
does not show evidence of low genome plasticity. The reason for this
lower substitution rate is still unknown, although a static habitat and a
lack of predation over evolutionary timescales could be contributing
factors to a lower need for adaptation. A closer examination of gene
families that show either unusually high or low levels of directional
selection indicative of adaptation in the coelacanth may provide
information on which selective pressures acted, and which pressures did
not act, to shape this evolutionary relict (Supplementary Note 13 and Supplementary Fig. 22).
The
vertebrate land transition is one of the most important steps in our
evolutionary history. We conclude that the closest living fish to the
tetrapod ancestor is the lungfish, not the coelacanth. However, the
coelacanth is critical to our understanding of this transition, as the
lungfish have intractable genome sizes (estimated at 50–100Gb)47.
Here we have examined vertebrate adaptation to land through coelacanth
whole-genome analysis, and have shown the potential of focused analysis
of specific gene families involved in this process. Further study of
these changes between tetrapods and the coelacanth may provide important
insights into how a complex organism like a vertebrate can markedly
change its way of life.
A full description of methods, including information on sample
collection, sequencing, assembly, annotation, all sequence analysis and
functional validation, can be found in the Supplementary Information.
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Acquisition and storage of Latimeria chalumnae samples was
supported by grants from the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme of
the South African National Department of Science and Technology.
Generation of the Latimeria chalumnae and Protopterus annectens
sequences by the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and Harvard University was supported by grants from the
National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). K.L.T. is the
recipient of a EURYI award from the European Science Foundation. We
would also like to thank the Genomics Sequencing Platform of the Broad
Institute for sequencing the L. chalumnae genome and L. chalumnae and P. annectens
transcriptomes, S. Ahamada, R. Stobbs and the Association pour le
Protection de Gombesa (APG) for their help in obtaining coelacanth
samples, Y. Zhao for the use of data from Rana chensinensis, and L. Gaffney, C. Hamilton and J. Westlund for assistance with figure preparation.
Molecular Genetics Program, Benaroya Research Institute, Seattle, Washington 98101, USA
Chris T. Amemiya,
Mark Robinson &
Nil Ratan Saha
Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA
Chris T. Amemiya
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA
Jessica Alföldi,
Iain MacCallum,
Aaron M. Berlin,
Lin Fan,
Sante Gnerre,
Andreas Gnirke,
Jeremy Johnson,
Marcia Lara,
Joshua Z. Levin,
Evan Mauceli,
Dariusz Przybylski,
Filipe J. Ribeiro,
Ted Sharpe,
Diana Tabbaa,
Jason Turner-Maier,
Louise Williams,
David B. Jaffe,
Federica Di Palma,
Eric S. Lander &
Kerstin Lindblad-Toh
Comparative Genomics Laboratory, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR, Biopolis, Singapore 138673, Singapore
Alison P. Lee,
Vydianathan Ravi &
Byrappa Venkatesh
Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz 78464, Germany
Shaohua Fan,
Tereza Manousaki,
Nathalie Feiner,
Shigehiro Kuraku,
Oleg Simakov &
Axel Meyer
Département de Biochimie, Université de Montréal, Centre Robert Cedergren, Montréal H3T 1J4, Canada
Hervé Philippe &
Henner Brinkmann
Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA
Ingo Braasch &
John H. Postlethwait
Konstanz Research School of Chemical Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz 78464, Germany
Tereza Manousaki &
Axel Meyer
Instituto de Ciencias Biologicas, Universidade Federal do Para, Belem 66075-110, Brazil
Igor Schneider
Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
Nicolas Rohner &
Clifford J. Tabin
Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA
Chris Organ
Institut de Genomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, Lyon 69007, France
Domitille Chalopin &
Jean-Nicolas Volff
Department of Biology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506, USA
Jeramiah J. Smith
Biomedical Biotechnology Research Unit (BioBRU), Department of
Biochemistry, Microbiology & Biotechnology, Rhodes University,
Grahamstown 6139, South Africa
Rosemary A. Dorrington,
Gregory L. Blatch &
Adrienne L. Edkins
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste 34128, Italy
Marco Gerdol,
Gianluca De Moro &
Alberto Pallavicini
Department of Informatics, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton CB10 1SA, UK
Bronwen Aken,
Stephen M. J. Searle &
Simon White
Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona 60131, Italy
Maria Assunta Biscotti,
Marco Barucca,
Adriana Canapa,
Mariko Forconi &
Ettore Olmo
Department of Life Sciences, University of Liege, Liege 4000, Belgium
Denis Baurain
College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne VIC 8001, Australia
Gregory L. Blatch
Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-food and Forest Systems, University of Tuscia, Viterbo 01100, Italy
Francesco Buonocore,
Anna Maria Fausto &
Giuseppe Scapigliati
Department of Biology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg 20146, Germany
Thorsten Burmester
Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA
Michael S. Campbell &
Mark Yandell
Department of Pediatrics, University of South Florida Morsani
College of Medicine, Children’s Research Institute, St. Petersburg,
Florida 33701, USA
John P. Cannon &
Gary W. Litman
South African National Bioinformatics Institute, University of the Western Cape, Bellville 7535, South Africa
Alan Christoffels,
Junaid Gamieldien,
Uljana Hesse,
Sumir Panji,
Barbara Picone &
Peter van Heusden
International Max-Planck Research School for Organismal Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz 78464, Germany
MRC Functional Genomics Unit, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3PT, UK
Wilfried Haerty &
Chris P. Ponting
Transcriptome Bioinformatics Group, LIFE Research Center for Civilization Diseases, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig 04109, Germany
Steve Hoffmann
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yokohama 223-8522, Japan
Tsutomu Miyake
Department of Molecular Genetics, All Children’s Hospital, St. Petersburg, Florida 33701, USA
M. Gail Mueller
Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Biochemistry,
University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee 38163,
USA
David R. Nelson
Bioinformatics Group, Department of Computer Science, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig 04109, Germany
Anne Nitsche,
Peter F. Stadler &
Hakim Tafer
Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Hayama 240-0193, Japan
Tatsuya Ota
Computational EvoDevo Group, Department of Computer Science, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig 04109, Germany
Sonja J. Prohaska
Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2JD, UK
Tatjana Sauka-Spengler
European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg 69117, Germany
Oleg Simakov
Division of Population Genetics, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima 411-8540, Japan
Kenta Sumiyama
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
Neil Shubin
Department Physiological Chemistry, Biocenter, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg 97070, Germany
Manfred Schartl
Science for Life Laboratory, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University, Uppsala 751 23, Sweden
Kerstin Lindblad-Toh
Present addresses: Genome Resource and Analysis Unit, Center
for Developmental Biology, RIKEN, Kobe, Japan (S.K.); Boston Children’s
Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (E.M.); Computational Biology Unit,
Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of
Cape Town Health Sciences Campus, Anzio Road, Observatory 7925, South
Africa (S.P.); New York Genome Center, New York, New York, USA (F.J.R.).
Shigehiro Kuraku,
Evan Mauceli,
Sumir Panji &
Filipe J. Ribeiro
Contributions
AuthorContributions J.A., C.T.A., A.M. and K.L.T.
planned and oversaw the project. R.A.D. and C.T.A. provided blood and
tissues for sequencing. C.T.A. and M.L. prepared the DNA for sequencing.
I.M., S.G., D.P., F.J.R., T.S. and D.B.J. assembled the genome. N.R.S.
and C.T.A. prepared RNA from L. chalumnae and P. annectens, and L.F. and J.Z.L. made the L. chalumnae RNA-seq library. A.C., M.B., M.A.B., M.F., F.B., G.S., A.M.F., A.P., M.G., G.D.M., J.T.-M. and E.O. sequenced and analysed the L. menadoensis
RNA-seq library. B.A., S.M.J.S., S.W., M.S.C. and M.Y. annotated the
genome. W.H. and C.P.P. carried out the annotation and analysis of long
non-coding RNAs. P.F.S., S.H., A.N., H.T. and S.J.P. annotated
non-coding RNAs. M.G., G.D.M., A.P., M.R. and C.T.A. compared L. chalumnae and L. menadoensis
sequences. H.B., D.B. and H.P. carried out the phylogenomic analysis.
T.Ma. and A.M. performed the gene relative-rate analysis. A.C., J.G.,
S.P., B.P., P.v.H. and U.H. carried out the analysis, annotation and
statistical enrichment of L. chalumnae specific gene
duplications. N.F. and A.M. analysed the homeobox gene repertoires.
G.L.B. and A.L.E. analysed the chaperone genes. D.C., S.F., O.S.,
J.-N.V., M.S. and A.M. analysed transposable elements. J.J.S. analysed
large-scale rearrangements in vertebrate genomes. I.B., J.H.P., N.F. and
S.K. analysed genes lost in tetrapods. T.Mi. analysed actinodin and
pectoral-fin musculature. C.O. and M.S. analysed selection in urea cycle
genes. A.P.L. and B.V. carried out the conserved non-coding element
analysis. I.S., N.R., V.R., N.S. and C.J.T. carried out the analysis of
autopodial CNEs. K.S., T.S.-S. and C.T.A. examined the evolution of a
placenta-related CNE. N.R.S., G.W.L., M.G.M., T.O. and C.T.A. performed
the IgM analysis. J.A., C.T.A., A.M. and K.L.T. wrote the paper with
input from other authors.
Competing financial interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Genome assemblies, transcriptomes and mitochondrial DNA sequences have been deposited in GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ. The L. chalumnae genome assembly has been deposited under the accession number AFYH00000000. The L. chalumnae transcriptome has been deposited under the accession number SRX117503 and the P. annectans transcriptomes have been deposited under the accession numbers SRX152529, SRX152530 and SRX152531. The P. annectans mitochondrial DNA sequence was deposited under the accession number JX568887. All animal experiments were approved by the MIT Committee for Animal Care.
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