生物
人体回声定位
嗅觉感受器
进化生物学
感觉系统
计算生物学
嗅觉
食虫动物
系统发育学
系统发育树
生态学
动物
神经科学
遗传学
基因
捕食
作者
Zhang Tian-min,Huaiqi Jing,Jinhong Wang,Le Zhao,Yang Liu,Stephen J. Rossiter,Hui‐Meng Lu,Gang Luo
标识
DOI:10.1111/1755-0998.13958
摘要
The origin of flight and laryngeal echolocation in bats is likely to have been accompanied by evolutionary changes in other aspects of their sensory biology. Of all sensory modalities in bats, olfaction is perhaps the least well understood. Olfactory receptors (ORs) function in recognizing odour molecules, with crucial roles in evaluating food, as well as in processing social information. Here we compare OR repertoire sizes across taxa and apply a new pipeline that integrates comparative genome data with protein structure modelling and then we employ molecular docking techniques with small molecules to analyse OR functionality based on binding energies. Our results suggest a sharp contraction in odorant recognition of the functional OR repertoire during the origin of bats, consistent with a reduced dependence on olfaction. We also compared bat lineages with contrasting different ecological characteristics and found evidence of differences in OR gene expansion and contraction, and in the composition of ORs with different tuning breadths. The strongest binding energies of ORs in non-echolocating fruit-eating bats were seen to correspond to ester odorants, although we did not detect a quantitative advantage of functional OR repertoires in these bats compared with echolocating insectivorous species. Overall, our findings based on molecular modelling and computational docking suggest that bats have undergone olfactory evolution linked to dietary adaptation. Our results from extant and ancestral bats help to lay the groundwork for targeted experimental functional tests in the future.
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