Differentiation of olfactory receptor gene family composition among chimpanzee, bonobo and human revealed by targeted capture

抄録

The olfactory receptor (OR) gene family is the largest multigene family in vertebrate genome of which the composition would reflect taxon/species-specific sensory evolution. Genus Pan is the closest relative to humans. Study of their OR gene family composition enables identification of human-specific and Pan-specific changes as well as identification of genetic differentiation between closely related species: chimpanzee and bonobo. However, the public whole-genome sequence (WGS) of Pan species would not be as accurate as the human reference WGS. Thus, we applied the targeted capture (TC) for OR genes from a chimpanzee and a bonobo genomic DNA sample to achieve high-depth massive-parallel sequencing. We detected OR segregating pseudogenes with intact and disrupted alleles, which are not informed in many public WGS. Our TC-based approach successfully retrieved a larger number of functional OR genes than WGS databases. We identified taxon-specific and species-specific OR gene loss and gain among chimpanzee, bonobo and human. These differences would be the study target for evolutionary and functional analyses in the next step.