A maternal-effect selfish genetic element in Caenorhabditis elegans

Selfish genetic elements spread in natural populations and have an important role in genome evolution.We discovered a selfish element causing embryonic lethality in crosses between wild strains of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The element is made up of sup-35, a maternal-effect toxin that kil...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2017-06, Vol.356 (6342), p.1051-1055
Main Authors: Ben-David, Eyal, Burga, Alejandro, Kruglyak, Leonid
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Antidotes
Biological evolution
Caenorhabditis elegans
Caenorhabditis elegans - embryology
Caenorhabditis elegans - genetics
Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins - genetics
Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins - metabolism
Coding
Divergence
Embryo, Nonmammalian - metabolism
Embryogenesis
Embryonic growth stage
Embryos
Evolutionary genetics
Female
Genes
Genes, Lethal
Genetic screening
Genetics
Genomes
Incompatibility
Lethality
Male
Maternal Inheritance
Natural populations
Nematoda
Nematodes
Next-generation sequencing
Pharynx
Phylogeny
Populations
Reconstruction
Repetitive Sequences, Nucleic Acid
Stems
Toxicity
Toxins
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Summary:Selfish genetic elements spread in natural populations and have an important role in genome evolution.We discovered a selfish element causing embryonic lethality in crosses between wild strains of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The element is made up of sup-35, a maternal-effect toxin that kills developing embryos, and pha-1, its zygotically expressed antidote. pha-1 has long been considered essential for pharynx development on the basis of its mutant phenotype, but this phenotype arises from a loss of suppression of sup-35 toxicity. Inactive copies of the sup-35/pha-1 element show high sequence divergence from active copies, and phylogenetic reconstruction suggests that they represent ancestral stages in the evolution of the element. Our results suggest that other essential genes identified by genetic screens may turn out to be components of selfish elements.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.aan0621