Abstract
Snail genes comprise a family of zinc-finger transcription factor coding genes with multiple roles in early embryonic development of metazoans. The evolutionary history of this family has been studied in detail, revealing an initial duplication in Snail and Scratch genes preceding the protostome/deuterostome split, and posterior independent duplication events in the lineages leading to insects and vertebrates. The distribution of mammalian and teleost Snail genes fits with current models for whole genome duplication events at the base of the vertebrate lineage, plus an extra duplication in teleosts. However, two very divergent Snail genes, one from mammals and the other from teleost fishes, fit poorly into the phylogenetic analysis of the family. By means of database mining and synteny analysis, we provide evidence for these genes being orthologues, and evidence that they originated in an early duplication at the base of the vertebrates resulting in three and not two Snail genes. We further show that all three Snail genes lie in regions of extensive paralogy, revealing their common origin through segmental or chromosomal duplication.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Annamaria Locascio and members of the Nieto lab for discussion and suggestions on the manuscript, Matt Wright (HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee) for help in setting a new nomenclature for the Snail family, Qiling Xu (MRC NIMR, London) for providing zebrafish embryos, Dr. Zhiyuan Gong (National University of Singapore) for providing the zebrafish snail3 EST clone and all the people behind the Ensembl project for making such useful resources available to the community. We apologize for not including references to all primary work due to space limitations. This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology to M.M. (BMC0203558) and to M.A.N. (BMC0200383). M.J.B. is a researcher of the Ramón y Cajal Program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.
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Manzanares, M., Blanco, M.J. & Nieto, M.Á. Snail3 orthologues in vertebrates: divergent members of the Snail zinc-finger gene family. Dev Genes Evol 214, 47–53 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-003-0373-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-003-0373-1