Chitinase genes (CHIA s) provide genomic footprints of a post-Cretaceous dietary radiation in placental mammals

Science Advances
Christopher A EmerlingMichael W Nachman

Abstract

The end-Cretaceous extinction led to a massive faunal turnover, with placental mammals radiating in the wake of nonavian dinosaurs. Fossils indicate that Cretaceous stem placentals were generally insectivorous, whereas their earliest Cenozoic descendants occupied a variety of dietary niches. It is hypothesized that this dietary radiation resulted from the opening of niche space, following the extinction of dinosaurian carnivores and herbivores. We provide the first genomic evidence for the occurrence and timing of this dietary radiation in placental mammals. By comparing the genomes of 107 placental mammals, we robustly infer that chitinase genes (CHIAs), encoding enzymes capable of digesting insect exoskeletal chitin, were present as five functional copies in the ancestor of all placental mammals, and the number of functional CHIAs in the genomes of extant species positively correlates with the percentage of invertebrates in their diets. The diverse repertoire of CHIAs in early placental mammals corroborates fossil evidence of insectivory in Cretaceous eutherians, with descendant lineages repeatedly losing CHIAs beginning at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary as they radiated into noninsectivorous niches. Furthermore, th...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 24, 2019·Médecine sciences : M/S·Frédéric DelsucMichael W Nachman
Mar 7, 2019·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Thomas J D HallidayAnjali Goswami
May 2, 2019·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Gemma Louise BeneventoMatt Friedman
Jul 17, 2019·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Hengwu JiaoHuabin Zhao
Nov 8, 2019·PLoS Biology·Amrita SrivathsanRudolf Meier
Nov 9, 2019·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Bing-Jun WangHuabin Zhao
May 26, 2020·Nucleic Acids Research·Luís Q AlvesL Filipe C Castro
Feb 6, 2019·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Nikolai HeckerMichael Hiller
Aug 11, 2020·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Andrew H Moeller, Jon G Sanders
Nov 6, 2018·Genome Biology and Evolution·Virag Sharma, Michael Hiller
Nov 8, 2019·Current Opinion in Insect Science·Andrew D GlossNoah K Whiteman
Jun 24, 2019·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·David M GrossnickleGregory P Wilson

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Software Mentioned

R
BLAST
CHIA
RAxML
Geneious Translation align
caper
EGA
Translation
MUltiple Sequence Comparison by Log - Expectation ( MUSCLE )
PIP

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