PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - David N. Olivieri
AU  - Francisco Gambón-Deza
TI  - V genes in primates from whole genome shotgun data
AID  - 10.1101/006924
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 006924
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/07/08/006924.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/07/08/006924.full
AB  - The adaptive immune system uses V genes for antigen recognition. The evolutionary diversification and selection processes within and across species and orders are poorly understood. Here, we studied the amino acid (AA) sequences obtained of translated in-frame V exons of immunoglobulins (IG) and T cell receptors (TR) from 16 primate species whose genomes have been sequenced. Multi-species comparative analysis supports the hypothesis that V genes in the IG loci undergo birth/death processes, thereby permitting rapid adaptability over evolutionary time. We also show that multiple cladistic groupings exist in the TRA (35 clades) and TRB (25 clades) V gene loci and that each primate species typically contributes at least one V gene to each of these clade. The results demonstrate that IG V genes and TR V genes have quite different evolutionary pathways; multiple duplications can explain the IG loci results, while co-evolutionary pressures can explain the phylogenetic results, as seen in genes of the TR loci. We describe how each of the 35 V genes clades of the TRA locus and 25 clades of the TRB locus must have specific and necessary roles for the viability of the species.