Evolutionary emergence of Hairless as a novel component of the Notch signaling pathway
Abstract
Suppressor of Hairless [Su(H)], the transcription factor at the end of the Notch pathway in Drosophila, utilizes the Hairless protein to recruit two co-repressors, Groucho (Gro) and C-terminal Binding Protein (CtBP), indirectly. Hairless is present only in the Pancrustacea, raising the question of how Su(H) in other protostomes gains repressive function. We show that Su(H) from a wide array of arthropods, molluscs, and annelids includes motifs that directly bind Gro and CtBP; thus, direct co-repressor recruitment is ancestral in the protostomes. How did Hairless come to replace this ancestral paradigm? Our discovery of a protein (S-CAP) in Myriapods and Chelicerates that contains a motif similar to the Su(H)-binding domain in Hairless has revealed a likely evolutionary connection between Hairless and Metastasis-associated (MTA) protein, a component of the NuRD complex. Sequence comparison and widely conserved microsynteny suggest that S-CAP and Hairless arose from a tandem duplication of an ancestral MTA gene.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM046993)
- James W Posakony
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM120377)
- James W Posakony
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Miller et al.
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.
Metrics
-
- 1,641
- views
-
- 226
- downloads
-
- 4
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 4
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48115