Pseudogenization of the tumor-growth promoter angiogenin in a leaf-eating monkey☆
Introduction
Angiogenin (ANG) was originally isolated from human tumor cell-conditioned medium based on its ability to stimulate formation of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) (Fett et al., 1985). It was subsequently found to belong to the RNase A superfamily by sequence homology (Kurachi et al., 1985, Strydom et al., 1985) and was named RNase 5 (reviewed in Strydom, 1998). RNase A superfamily has 8 members in humans (Zhang et al., 2002a) and they exhibit drastically different physiological functions, albeit with the common ribonuclease activity (D'Alession and Riordan, 1996, Beintema and Kleineidam, 1998). ANG is the only member of the superfamily known to be angiogenic. Although the ribonuclease activity of ANG is about a million times lower than that of pancreatic RNase, the prototype of the superfamily, the ribonuclease activity is required for the angiogenic activity (Shapiro et al., 1986). The molecular mechanism of the angiogenic activity has not been fully elucidated, though a working model has been proposed (Vallee and Riordan, 1997). ANG has elevated expression in various tumors, including breast, pancreatic, gastric, colorectal, and urothelial cancers, and the angiogenic activity is related to cancer progression (Shimoyama et al., 1996, Shimoyama et al., 1999, Montero et al., 1998, Miyake et al., 1999, Shimoyama and Kaminishi, 2000). Not surprisingly, ANG antagonists have the ability to inhibit cancer growth in vivo (Olson et al., 1994, Olson et al., 1995, Piccoli et al., 1998, Kao et al., 2002). In addition, several authors suggested the role for ANG during pregnancy in tissue vascularization of the developing embryo (Hayashi et al., 2000, Koga et al., 2000, Malamitsi-Puchner et al., 2000). Given these properties, it becomes increasingly important to understand the physiological function of angiogenin. In principle, the function of ANG can be studied in model organisms such as the mouse. The phenotype of the mouse with the ANG gene deleted can reveal the physiological roles of ANG. The situation, however, is complicated by the fact that there is only one ANG gene in the human, but three in the mouse (Brown et al., 1995). Phylogenetic analyses suggested that the three ANG genes of the mouse were generated from two rodent-specific gene duplications (Strydom, 1998, Zhang and Rosenberg, 2002). Mouse ANG1 and ANG3 are angiogenic whereas ANG2 is not (Nobile et al., 1996, Fu et al., 1999). Because it is unknown whether the physiological function of ANG is related to its angiogenic activity, it seems necessary to knockout all three ANG genes of the mouse to study the normal function of ANGs. Furthermore, due to the rodent-specific gene duplications and possible functional changes after the duplications, it is unclear whether the function of human ANG can be adequately inferred from the knockout mice. After all, it is the functional information of human ANG that is needed for understanding its role in tumor-growth promotion. Given these facts, it would be ideal to use a primate model rather than a rodent model to study ANG, as primates are not known to have more than one ANG gene (Zhang and Rosenberg, 2002). In an evolutionary survey, we inadvertently discovered that the ANG gene of a leaf-eating monkey is naturally inactivated. Here we report this finding as well as an evolutionary analysis of the pseudogenization event. We propose that a study of this monkey species may reveal useful information on the physiological function of human ANG.
Section snippets
DNA sequencing
The ANG gene has only one coding exon, which was amplified from genomic DNAs of six species belonging to the subfamily Colobinae of Old World monkeys by PCR with primers ANG-5 (5′-GTGTTGGAAGAGATGGTGATGGGC-3′) and ANG-3 (5′-AGCACTTGACCAGGGGCCCGCTGGTTA-3′). The first four codons of the ANG gene were encoded in the ANG-5 primer. The six species are the douc langur (Pygathrix nemaeus), Tonkin snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus avunculus), Biet's snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti), golden
ANG pseudogene of the douc langur
We previously demonstrated that the ANG gene evolves rapidly under diversifying positive selection from a study of 11 noncolobine primates (Zhang and Rosenberg, 2002). In an expanded evolutionary survey of the gene among different primates, we inadvertently found in the douc langur (P. nemaeus) a one-nucleotide deletion in the ANG coding region. The deletion occurs at the second position of the sixth codon of the mature peptide, and shifts the open reading frame (Fig. 1). This results in the
Discussion
In this study, we showed that the ANG gene of the douc langur P. nemaeus was inactivated by a one-nucleotide deletion in its coding region. We believe that this pseudogene is the sole ANG gene in the douc langur, because our extensive PCR-cloning-sequencing experiments resulted in only one gene. Furthermore, a search in the human genome sequence identified only one ANG gene (Zhang and Rosenberg, 2002, Zhang et al., 2002a) and previous phylogenetic analyses of the ANG sequences from 11
Acknowledgements
We thank Jaap Beintema, David Webb, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an early version of the manuscript. This work was supported by a startup fund from the University of Michigan to J.Z. and research grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01-GM67030) to J.Z., Natural Science Foundation of China to Y.P.Z., and Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-1-05) to Y.P.Z.
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Sequence data from this article have been deposited with GenBank under accession numbers AY221128–221134.