Nygaard, S;
Braunstein, A;
Malsen, G;
Van Dongen, S;
Gardner, PP;
Krogh, A;
Otto, TD;
... Jeffares, DC; + view all
(2010)
Long- and Short-Term Selective Forces on Malaria Parasite Genomes.
PLOS GENET
, 6
(9)
, Article e1001099. 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001099.
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Abstract
Plasmodium parasites, the causal agents of malaria, result in more than 1 million deaths annually. Plasmodium are unicellular eukaryotes with small similar to 23 Mb genomes encoding similar to 5200 protein-coding genes. The protein-coding genes comprise about half of these genomes. Although evolutionary processes have a significant impact on malaria control, the selective pressures within Plasmodium genomes are poorly understood, particularly in the non-protein-coding portion of the genome. We use evolutionary methods to describe selective processes in both the coding and non-coding regions of these genomes. Based on genome alignments of seven Plasmodium species, we show that protein-coding, intergenic and intronic regions are all subject to purifying selection and we identify 670 conserved non-genic elements. We then use genome-wide polymorphism data from P. falciparum to describe short-term selective processes in this species and identify some candidate genes for balancing (diversifying) selection. Our analyses suggest that there are many functional elements in the non-genic regions of these genomes and that adaptive evolution has occurred more frequently in the protein-coding regions of the genome.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Long- and Short-Term Selective Forces on Malaria Parasite Genomes |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001099 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1001099 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2010 Nygaard et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: SVD, PPG, AP, MB, EM, GM, TDO and DCJ were supported by the Wellcome Trust through its support to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (grant 085775/Z/08/Z), http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/. SN and AK were supported by a grant from the Novo-Nordisk Foundation, http://www.novonordiskfonden.dk/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. |
| Keywords: | ADAPTIVE PROTEIN EVOLUTION, PLASMODIUM-FALCIPARUM, NATURAL-SELECTION, REGULATORY MOTIFS, MITOCHONDRIAL-DNA, DROSOPHILA GENOME, GENE-EXPRESSION, IDENTIFICATION, VACCINE, POLYMORPHISM |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/143093 |
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