PRDM9 is currently the sole speciation gene found in vertebrates causing hybrid sterility probably due to incompatible alleles. Its role in defining the double strand break loci during the meiotic prophase I is crucial for proper chromosome segregation. Therefore, the rapid turnover of the loci determining zinc finger array seems to be causative for incompatibilities. We here investigated the zinc finger domain-containing exon of PRDM9 in 23 tarsiers. Tarsiers, the most basal extant haplorhine primates, exhibit two frameshifting indels at the 5′-end of the array. The first mutation event interrupts the reading frame and function while the second compensates both. The fixation of this allele variant in tarsiers led to hypothesize that de- and reactivation of the zinc finger domain drove the speciation in early haplorhine or tarsiiform primates. Moreover, the high allelic diversity within Tarsius points to multiple effects of genetic drift reflecting their phylogeographic history since the Miocene.

PRDM9 is currently the sole speciation gene found in vertebrates causing hybrid sterility probably due to incompatible alleles. Its role in defining the double strand break loci during the meiotic prophase I is crucial for proper chromosome segregation. Therefore, the rapid turnover of the loci determining zinc finger array seems to be causative for incompatibilities. We here investigated the zinc finger domain-containing exon of PRDM9 in 23 tarsiers. Tarsiers, the most basal extant haplorhine primates, exhibit two frameshifting indels at the 5'-end of the array. The first mutation event interrupts the reading frame and function while the second compensates both. The fixation of this peculiar allele variant in tarsiers led to hypothesize that de-and reactivation of the zinc finger domain drove the speciation in early haplorhine primates. Moreover, the high allelic diversity within Tarsius point to multiple effects of genetic drift reflecting their phylogeographic history since the Miocene.

Studies on the function of PRDM9 in model systems and its evolution during vertebrate divergence shed light on the basic molecular mechanisms of hybrid sterility and its evolutionary consequences. However, information regarding PRDM9-homolog, PRDM7, whose origin is placed in the primate evolutionary tree, as well as information about the fast-evolving DNA-binding zinc finger array of strepsirrhine PRDM9 are scarce. Thus, we aimed to narrow down the date of the duplication event leading to the emergence of PRDM7 during primate evolution by comparing the phylogenetic tree reconstructions of representative primate samples of PRDM orthologs and paralogs. To confirm our PRDM7 paralogization pattern, database-deposited sequences were used to test the presence/absence patterns expected from the paralogization timing. In addition, we extended the existing phylogenetic tree of haplorrhine PRDM9 zinc fingers with their strepsirrhine counterparts. The inclusion of strepsirrhine zinc fingers completes the PRDM9 primate phylogeny. Moreover, the updated phylogeny of PRDM9 zinc fingers showed distinct clusters of strepsirrhine, tarsier, and anthropoid degenerated zinc fingers. Here, we show that PRDM7 emerged on the branch leading to the most recent common ancestor of catarrhines; therefore, its origin is more recent than previously expected. A more detailed character evolutionary study suggests that PRDM7 may have evolved differently in Cercopithecoidea as compared to Hominoidea: it lacks the first four exons in Old World monkeys orthologs and exon 10 in Papionini orthologs. Dating the origin of PRDM7 is essential for further studies investigating why Hominoidea representatives need another putative histone methyltransferase in the testis.