A de novo evolved gene in the house mouse regulates female pregnancy cycles

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Abstract

The de novo emergence of new genes has been well documented through genomic analyses. However, a functional analysis, especially of very young protein-coding genes, is still largely lacking. Here, we identify a set of house mouse-specific protein-coding genes and assess their translation by ribosome profiling and mass spectrometry data. We functionally analyze one of them, Gm13030, which is specifically expressed in females in the oviduct. The interruption of the reading frame affects the transcriptional network in the oviducts at a specific stage of the estrous cycle. This includes the upregulation of Dcpp genes, which are known to stimulate the growth of preimplantation embryos. As a consequence, knockout females have their second litters after shorter times and have a higher infanticide rate. Given that Gm13030 shows no signs of positive selection, our findings support the hypothesis that a de novo evolved gene can directly adopt a function without much sequence adaptation.

Data availability

The ENA BioProject accession number for the sequencing data reported in this study is PRJEB28348

The following data sets were generated

1. Xie C
2. Kuenzel S
3. Tautz D
(2018) RNA-Seq and whole genome sequencing of the samples from three de novo gene knockout mouse lines and transfected MEFs on C57BL/6 background
European Nucleotide Archive, PRJEB28348.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/search?query=PRJEB28348

Article and author information

Author details

Chen Xie

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6183-7301
Cemalettin Bekpen

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Sven Künzel

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Maryam Keshavarz

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Rebecca Krebs-Wheaton

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Neva Skrabar

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Kristian Karsten Ullrich

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4308-9626
Diethard Tautz

Department Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

For correspondence
tautz@evolbio.mpg.de

Competing interests
Diethard Tautz, Senior editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0460-5344

Funding

H2020 European Research Council (NewGenes - 322564)

Chen Xie

Max-Planck Institut fuer Evolutionsbiologie (Open-access funding)

Diethard Tautz

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: The behavioral studies were approved by the supervising authority (Ministerium für Energiewende, Landwirtschaftliche Räume und Umwelt, Kiel) under the registration numbers V244-71173/2015, V244-4415/2017 and V244-47238/17. Animals were kept according to FELASA (Federation of European Laboratory Animal Science Association) guidelines, with the permit from the Veterinäramt Kreis Plön: 1401-144/PLÖ-004697. The respective animal welfare officer at the University of Kiel was informed about the sacrifice of the animals for this study.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.