Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RipGEESE (Identifying the ripples of gene regulation evolution in the evolution of gene sequences to determine when animal nervous systems evolved)
Reporting period: 2021-02-26 to 2024-02-25
To date, we don't know how biochemical interactions between proteins in our bodies affect the evolution of those proteins in the long term. This project aims to fill this knowledge gap by focussing on a well-known and relatively well understood system - the nervous system, to retrace the evolution of the proteins involved in its construction and function. The nervous system is found in almost all animals and is essential to understand which elements of our genetic makeup are responsible for this amazing system. It is important to understand the building blocks of systems that we would need to fix, as would be the case with neurological diseases. The overall objective of this project is to use the nervous system as a launching platform to better understand how genomes (the one biological element all living beings have) evolve in a more general sense.
We checked which genes are expressed in nervous systems in all the animal lineages with a nervous system, including very different species (ex. anemonae, fly, and mouse). We then determined which genes were found in the neurons of *all* animals with a nervous system, and identified their function. Because it is not clear how the sequences of genes which share a function (say, construct a nervous system) evolve, we also created artificial organisms which simulate the evolution of genes which interact with one another for a crucial biological function, and showed for the first time ever how existing tools are able to detect evolution of the system just by looking at how the sequences of the genes involved change through time. We were able to identify 39 proteins which are needed in all nervous systems studied (eight in total), and found out that one of these is only found in animals with a nervous system, which means that they probably stem from the same ancestor.
The results and methods developed and proven with this project will enhance genome evolution research and give a new level of exploitation to public single cell and full organism gene expression data. Because genomes and the mechanisms of genomic regulation are mostly universal, the results here have the potential to impact fields within the life sciences ranging from conservation biology to personalised medicine.