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Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness

While the concept of “evolutionary conservation” has enabled biologists to explain many ancestral features and traits, it has also frequently been misused to evaluate the degree of changes from a common ancestor, or “derivedness”. We propose that the distinction of these two concepts allows us to pr...

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Autores principales: Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan, Uesaka, Masahiro, Irie, Naoki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8954198/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35330191
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life12030440
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author Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan
Uesaka, Masahiro
Irie, Naoki
author_facet Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan
Uesaka, Masahiro
Irie, Naoki
author_sort Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan
collection PubMed
description While the concept of “evolutionary conservation” has enabled biologists to explain many ancestral features and traits, it has also frequently been misused to evaluate the degree of changes from a common ancestor, or “derivedness”. We propose that the distinction of these two concepts allows us to properly understand phenotypic and organismal evolution. From a methodological aspect, “conservation” mainly considers genes or traits which species have in common, while “derivedness” additionally covers those that are not commonly shared, such as novel or lost traits and genes to evaluate changes from the time of divergence from a common ancestor. Due to these differences, while conservation-oriented methods are effective in identifying ancestral features, they may be prone to underestimating the overall changes accumulated during the evolution of certain lineages. Herein, we describe our recently developed method, “transcriptomic derivedness index”, for estimating the phenotypic derivedness of embryos with a molecular approach using the whole-embryonic transcriptome as a phenotype. Although echinoderms are often considered as highly derived species, our analyses with this method showed that their embryos, at least at the transcriptomic level, may not be much more derived than those of chordates. We anticipate that the future development of derivedness-oriented methods could provide quantitative indicators for finding highly/lowly evolvable traits.
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spelling pubmed-89541982022-03-26 Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan Uesaka, Masahiro Irie, Naoki Life (Basel) Review While the concept of “evolutionary conservation” has enabled biologists to explain many ancestral features and traits, it has also frequently been misused to evaluate the degree of changes from a common ancestor, or “derivedness”. We propose that the distinction of these two concepts allows us to properly understand phenotypic and organismal evolution. From a methodological aspect, “conservation” mainly considers genes or traits which species have in common, while “derivedness” additionally covers those that are not commonly shared, such as novel or lost traits and genes to evaluate changes from the time of divergence from a common ancestor. Due to these differences, while conservation-oriented methods are effective in identifying ancestral features, they may be prone to underestimating the overall changes accumulated during the evolution of certain lineages. Herein, we describe our recently developed method, “transcriptomic derivedness index”, for estimating the phenotypic derivedness of embryos with a molecular approach using the whole-embryonic transcriptome as a phenotype. Although echinoderms are often considered as highly derived species, our analyses with this method showed that their embryos, at least at the transcriptomic level, may not be much more derived than those of chordates. We anticipate that the future development of derivedness-oriented methods could provide quantitative indicators for finding highly/lowly evolvable traits. MDPI 2022-03-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8954198/ /pubmed/35330191 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life12030440 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Leong, Jason Cheok Kuan
Uesaka, Masahiro
Irie, Naoki
Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title_full Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title_fullStr Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title_full_unstemmed Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title_short Distinguishing Evolutionary Conservation from Derivedness
title_sort distinguishing evolutionary conservation from derivedness
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8954198/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35330191
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life12030440
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