Single amino acid change alters the ability to specify male or female organ identity

The molecular mechanisms underlying the developmental processes that shape living organisms provide a basis to understand the evolution of biological complexity. Gene duplication allows biological functions to become separated, leading to increased complexity through subfunctionalization. Recently,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2010-11, Vol.107 (44), p.18898-18902
Main Authors: Airoldi, Chiara A., Bergonzi, Sara, Davies, Brendan, Coen, Enrico Sandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amino Acid Substitution
Amino acids
Arabidopsis - genetics
Arabidopsis - metabolism
Arabidopsis Proteins - genetics
Arabidopsis Proteins - metabolism
Biological Sciences
Carpels
Evolution
Evolution, Molecular
Flowers
Gene expression
Gene Expression Regulation, Plant - physiology
Genes
MADS Domain Proteins
Models, Genetic
Morphology
Ovule - genetics
Ovule - metabolism
Petals
Plants
Pollen - genetics
Pollen - metabolism
Proteins
Stamens
Transcription factors
Yeasts
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Summary:The molecular mechanisms underlying the developmental processes that shape living organisms provide a basis to understand the evolution of biological complexity. Gene duplication allows biological functions to become separated, leading to increased complexity through subfunctionalization. Recently, the relative contributions to morphological evolution of changes to the regulatory and/or coding regions of duplicated genes have been the subject of debate. Duplication generated multiple copies of the MADS-box transcription factor genes that play essential roles in specifying organ identity in the flower, making this evolutionary novelty a good model to investigate the nature of the changes necessary to drive subfunctionalization. Here, we show that naturally occurring variation at a single amino acid in a MADS-box transcription factor switches its ability to specify male and female reproductive organs by altering its repertoire of protein–protein interactions. However, these different developmental fates are only manifest because of an underlying variation in the expression pattern of interacting proteins. This shows that the morphological outcomes of changes to protein sequence and gene expression must be interpreted in the context of the wider regulatory network. It also suggests an explanation for the surprisingly widespread duplications of some of the floral transcription factors.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1009050107