Convergent deployment of ancestral programs during the evolution of mammalian flight membranes

Abstract

Lateral flight membranes, or patagia, have evolved repeatedly in diverse mammalian lineages. While little is known about patagium development, its recurrent evolution may suggest a shared molecular basis. By combining transcriptomics, developmental experiments, and mouse transgenics, we demonstrate that lateral WNT5A expression in the marsupial sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) promotes the differentiation of its patagium primordium. We further show that this function of WNT5A reprises ancestral roles in skin morphogenesis predating mammalian flight and has been convergently employed during patagium evolution in eutherian bats. Moreover, we find that many genes involved in limb development have been re-deployed during patagium outgrowth in both the sugar glider and bat. Taken together, our findings reveal that deeply conserved molecular toolkits underpin the evolutionary transition to flight in mammals.

Pronounced expression of extracellular matrix proteoglycans regulated by Wnt pathway underlies the parallel evolution of lip hypertrophy in East African cichlids

“…The Wnt signaling pathway is known to be a key regulator of the expression of ECM-related genes; for example, vcan is directly regulated by the Wnt/b-catenin and tcf4 signaling pathways, leading to vcan upregulation (Rahmani et al, 2005). Additionally, Wnt5a, a noncanonical pathway, plays a critical role in dermal condensation during mouse and sugar glider development (Feigin et al, 2023). Cellular-level localization of gene expression for the canonical and non-canonical Wnt pathway is required for future examination of the involvement of the Wnt signaling pathway in lip hypertrophy.…”

Fused in sarcoma (FUS) inhibits milk production efficiency in mammals

“…Non-significant genes in sugar gliders were determined by an adjusted P value >0.05 and foldchange <−2 and <2. The reference genome and annotation versions used for analysis were GRCm39.108 for mice, Large_White_v1 for pigs, and ARS-UCD1.2 for cattle, with the sugar glider reference genome and annotation versions sourced from the FigShare repository: https://figshare.com/s/d6c585fbae0c1f22e8df 75 .…”

Cathelicidin antimicrobial peptides mediate immune protection of marsupial neonates

“…Thus, to gain more insights into the evolution and function of marsupial cathelicidins, we next characterized the expression of these genes in sugar gliders. To do this, we first systemically annotated all members of this gene family in the sugar glider genome, then performed expression-based validation (see materials and methods) (table S1 and data table S2) (44). In total, we identified ten cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide genes, labeled Camp1-10, as well as the sugar glider ortholog of Ngp (neutrophilic granule protein), a cathelicidin-related gene.…”

“…2B). To further filter our data, we reanalyzed ATAC-seq data from sugar glider skin tissue (47), which, with the exception of Camp7, does not express cathelicidin genes (44). Thus, we could exclude shared open chromatin regions between these tissues as plausible regulators of cathelicidin gene expression.…”