skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Gene expression of functionally-related genes coevolves across fungal species: detecting coevolution of gene expression using phylogenetic comparative methods

Journal Article · · BMC Genomics
ORCiD logo [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Genome Science and Technology; Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Chemical Sciences Division
  2. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Mathematical and Biological Synthesis
  3. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Genome Science and Technology; Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Mathematical and Biological Synthesis

Researchers often measure changes in gene expression across conditions to better understand the shared functional roles and regulatory mechanisms of different genes. Analogous to this is comparing gene expression across species, which can improve our understanding of the evolutionary processes shaping the evolution of both individual genes and functional pathways. One area of interest is determining genes showing signals of coevolution, which can also indicate potential functional similarity, analogous to co-expression analysis often performed across conditions for a single species. However, as with any trait, comparing gene expression across species can be confounded by the non-independence of species due to shared ancestry, making standard hypothesis testing inappropriate. We compared RNA-Seq data across 18 fungal species using a multivariate Brownian Motion phylogenetic comparative method (PCM), which allowed us to quantify coevolution between protein pairs while directly accounting for the shared ancestry of the species. Our work indicates proteins which physically-interact show stronger signals of coevolution than randomly-generated pairs. Interactions with stronger empirical and computational evidence also showing stronger signals of coevolution. We examined the effects of number of protein interactions and gene expression levels on coevolution, finding both factors are overall poor predictors of the strength of coevolution between a protein pair. Simulations further demonstrate the potential issues of analyzing gene expression coevolution without accounting for shared ancestry in a standard hypothesis testing framework. Furthermore, our simulations indicate the use of a randomly-generated null distribution as a means of determining statistical significance for detecting coevolving genes with phylogenetically-uncorrected correlations, as has previously been done, is less accurate than PCMs, although is a significant improvement over standard hypothesis testing. These methods are further improved by using a phylogenetically-corrected correlation metric. Our work highlights potential benefits of using PCMs to detect gene expression coevolution from high-throughput omics scale data. This framework can be built upon to investigate other evolutionary hypotheses, such as changes in transcription regulatory mechanisms across species.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1815917
Journal Information:
BMC Genomics, Vol. 21, Issue 1; ISSN 1471-2164
Publisher:
SpringerCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (79)

Evaluating modularity in morphometric data: challenges with the RV coefficient and a new test measure journal January 2016
A phylogenetic comparative method for studying multivariate adaptation journal December 2012
Phylogenetic Analysis of Gene Expression journal June 2013
The evolution of gene expression levels in mammalian organs journal October 2011
Phylogenetic Analysis of the Evolutionary Correlation Using Likelihood journal April 2009
The inference of protein-protein interactions by co-evolutionary analysis is improved by excluding the information about the phylogenetic relationships journal June 2005
Determinants of the rate of protein sequence evolution journal June 2015
Correlation between transcriptome and interactome mapping data from Saccharomyces cerevisiae journal November 2001
Multivariate Phylogenetic Comparative Methods: Evaluations, Comparisons, and Recommendations journal July 2017
A relationship between gene expression and protein interactions on the proteome scale: analysis of the bacteriophage T7 and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae journal September 2001
Evolutionary rate covariation reveals shared functionality and coexpression of genes journal January 2012
Phylogenetic Comparative Analysis: A Modeling Approach for Adaptive Evolution journal December 2004
Coevolution of gene expression among interacting proteins journal June 2004
Testing for Different Rates of Continuous Trait Evolution Using Likelihood journal May 2006
Inferring Evolutionary Histories of Pathway Regulation from Transcriptional Profiling Data journal October 2013
Comparing the strength of modular signal, and evaluating alternative modular hypotheses, using covariance ratio effect sizes with morphometric data journal November 2019
Stabilizing Selection and the Comparative Analysis of Adaptation journal October 1997
Intra and Interspecific Variations of Gene Expression Levels in Yeast Are Largely Neutral: (Nei Lecture, SMBE 2016, Gold Coast) journal May 2017
Phylogenies and the Comparative Method journal January 1985
Why highly expressed proteins evolve slowly journal September 2005
STRING v11: protein–protein association networks with increased coverage, supporting functional discovery in genome-wide experimental datasets journal November 2018
Salmon provides fast and bias-aware quantification of transcript expression journal March 2017
Estimating Gene Expression and Codon-Specific Translational Efficiencies, Mutation Biases, and Selection Coefficients from Genomic Data Alone ‡ journal May 2015
The Impact of Multifunctional Genes on "Guilt by Association" Analysis journal February 2011
FungiDB: An Integrated Bioinformatic Resource for Fungi and Oomycetes journal March 2018
Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution journal October 1999
Differences in environmental stress response among yeasts is consistent with species-specific lifestyles journal May 2016
Coexpression, coregulation, and cofunctionality of neighboring genes in eukaryotic genomes journal March 2008
A multispecies coalescent model for quantitative traits journal August 2018
Explaining complex codon usage patterns with selection for translational efficiency, mutation bias, and genetic drift journal June 2011
Phylogenetic ANOVA: The Expression Variance and Evolution Model for Quantitative Trait Evolution journal July 2015
Gene Trees in Species Trees journal September 1997
GenBank journal November 2015
TranslatorX: multiple alignment of nucleotide sequences guided by amino acid translations journal April 2010
Estimating Selection on Synonymous Codon Usage from Noisy Experimental Data journal March 2013
A Comment on Phylogenetic Correction journal January 2006
Comparative Methods for the Analysis of Gene-Expression Evolution: An Example Using Yeast Functional Genomic Data journal September 2004
treePL: divergence time estimation using penalized likelihood for large phylogenies journal August 2012
A Single Determinant Dominates the Rate of Yeast Protein Evolution journal October 2005
ape 5.0: an environment for modern phylogenetics and evolutionary analyses in R journal July 2018
Relative predicted protein levels of functionally associated proteins are conserved across organisms journal February 2005
Cluster analysis and display of genome-wide expression patterns journal December 1998
The codon adaptation index-a measure of directional synonymous codon usage bias, and its potential applications journal January 1987
Bootstrap Methods and their Application book January 1997
Reference sequence (RefSeq) database at NCBI: current status, taxonomic expansion, and functional annotation journal November 2015
The Awesome Power of Yeast Evolutionary Genetics: New Genome Sequences and Strain Resources for the Saccharomyces sensu stricto Genus journal June 2011
A Phylogenetic Mixture Model for the Evolution of Gene Expression journal July 2009
Procedures for the Analysis of Comparative Data Using Phylogenetically Independent Contrasts journal March 1992
Mistranslation-Induced Protein Misfolding as a Dominant Constraint on Coding-Sequence Evolution journal July 2008
clusterMaker: a multi-algorithm clustering plugin for Cytoscape journal November 2011
Predicting Functional Gene Links from Phylogenetic-Statistical Analyses of Whole Genomes journal June 2005
Comparative expression profiling reveals widespread coordinated evolution of gene expression across eukaryotes journal November 2018
Pairwise comparisons across species are problematic when analyzing functional genomic data journal January 2018
Modeling Gene Expression Evolution with an Extended Ornstein–Uhlenbeck Process Accounting for Within-Species Variation journal October 2013
Unexpected correlations between gene expression and codon usage bias from microarray data for the whole Escherichia coli K-12 genome journal December 2003
Phylogenomic Distance Method for Analyzing Transcriptome Evolution Based on RNA-seq Data journal August 2013
Optimization of gene expression by natural selection journal January 2009
Pervasive Correlated Evolution in Gene Expression Shapes Cell and Tissue Type Transcriptomes journal January 2018
Assessing Trait Covariation and Morphological Integration on Phylogenies Using Evolutionary Covariance Matrices journal April 2014
Effective population size and patterns of molecular evolution and variation journal March 2009
Evolutionary Rate in the Protein Interaction Network journal April 2002
Genome evolution across 1,011 Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates journal April 2018
The Aspergillus Genome Database: multispecies curation and incorporation of RNA-Seq data to improve structural gene annotations journal November 2013
The genome portal of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute: 2014 updates journal November 2013
Combining Models of Protein Translation and Population Genetics to Predict Protein Production Rates from Codon Usage Patterns journal August 2007
Protein abundances are more conserved than mRNA abundances across diverse taxa journal November 2010
Measurement of mRNA abundance using RNA-seq data: RPKM measure is inconsistent among samples journal August 2012
Phylogenetic signal and linear regression on species data: Phylogenetic regression journal June 2010
TimeTree: A Resource for Timelines, Timetrees, and Divergence Times journal April 2017
mv morph : an r package for fitting multivariate evolutionary models to morphometric data journal July 2015
Character trees from transcriptome data: Origin and individuation of morphological characters and the so-called “species signal”: TRANSCRIPTOME-BASED CHARACTER TREES journal July 2015
The Impact of Multifunctional Genes on "Guilt by Association" Analysis dataset January 2018
Procedures for the Analysis of Comparative Data Using Phylogenetically Independent Contrasts journal March 1992
STRING v11: protein-protein association networks with increased coverage, supporting functional discovery in genome-wide experimental datasets text January 2019
A Comment on Phylogenetic Correction journal July 2006
Testing for Different Rates of Continuous Trait Evolution Using Likelihood journal January 2006
Stabilizing Selection and the Comparative Analysis of Adaptation journal October 1997
Inferring evolutionary histories of pathway regulation from transcriptional profiling data text January 2013
Why highly expressed proteins evolve slowly text January 2005


Similar Records

Coevolution of gene expression among interacting proteins
Journal Article · Mon Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2004 · Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences · OSTI ID:1815917

An orthologous gene coevolution network provides insight into eukaryotic cellular and genomic structure and function
Journal Article · Wed May 04 00:00:00 EDT 2022 · Science Advances · OSTI ID:1815917

A coevolution-guided model for the rotor of the bacterial flagellar motor
Journal Article · Mon Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2018 · Scientific Reports · OSTI ID:1815917