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Functional Architecture of Deleterious Genetic Variants in the Genome of a Wrangel Island Mammoth
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Abstract
Woolly mammoths were among the most abundant cold-adapted species during the Pleistocene. Their once-large populations went extinct in two waves, an end-Pleistocene extinction of continental populations followed by the mid-Holocene extinction of relict populations on St. Paul Island ∼5,600 years ago and Wrangel Island ∼4,000 years ago. Wrangel Island mammoths experienced an episode of rapid demographic decline coincident with their isolation, leading to a small population, reduced genetic diversity, and the fixation of putatively deleterious alleles, but the functional consequences of these processes are unclear. Here, we show that a Wrangel Island mammoth genome had many putative deleterious mutations that are predicted to cause diverse behavioral and developmental defects. Resurrection and functional characterization of several genes from the Wrangel Island mammoth carrying putatively deleterious substitutions identified both loss and gain of function mutations in genes associated with developmental defects (HYLS1), oligozoospermia and reduced male fertility (NKD1), diabetes (NEUROG3), and the ability to detect floral scents (OR5A1). These data suggest that at least one Wrangel Island mammoth may have suffered adverse consequences from reduced population size and isolation.
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![Fig. 3 —The Wrangel Island mammoth NKD1 A88V substitution is a loss of function mutation. (A) The Wrangel Island mammoth A88V mutation is located near the EF-hand domain (dark blue), the calcium binding motif is shown in yellow. (B) Sequence logo showing conservation of NKD1 around the Wrangel Island A88V mutation. Upper, logo from 100 vertebrates. Lower, logo from mammoths (Oimyakon, M4, and Wrangel Island). (C) Luciferase expression from the pGL4.49[luc2P/TCF-LEF/Hygro] reporter vector in elephant fibroblasts transfected with control vector, AncYakut NKD1, or Wrangel Island (WI) Mammoth NKD1, and treated with the WNT-signaling agonist CHIR99021. Background luminescence of nontransfected cells (NTC).](/paper-figures/15b2879333104bde99e3932dfe9b96d8/functional-architecture-of-deleterious-genetic-variants-in-the-genome-of-a-figure-3.jpg)
![Fig. 4 —The Wrangel Island mammoth NEUROG3 is a hypermorph. (A) The Wrangel Island mammoth G195E mutation is located in the C-terminal transactivation domain of NEUROG3; location of mutations associated with human disease is shown in red. (B) Sequence logo showing conservation of NEUROG3 transactivation domain in mammals (upper) and mammoths (lower; Oimyakon, M4, and Wrangel Island). The location of ΦXXΦΦ cofactor interaction motifs are shown (Φ, any hydrophobic amino acid; X, any amino acid). (C) Relative luciferase expression from the pGL3[luc/6x-PAX4E/minP] reporter vector in elephant fibroblasts transfected with control vector, AncYakut NEUROG3, or Wrangel Island mammoth NEUROG3.](/paper-figures/051c57d229d6447f925f97ec88fbdcde/functional-architecture-of-deleterious-genetic-variants-in-the-genome-of-a-figure-4.jpg)

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“The resulting reduced genetic diversity and the accumulation of numerous potentially deleterious mutations may have precipitated the population's extinction through the alteration of important functions in development, reproduction, and olfaction [17][18][19] .”
From Ancient DNA analysis (2021) · cites this paper as [19]
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Orlando, L., Allaby, R., Skoglund, P., Der Sarkissian, C., Stockhammer, P. W., Ávila-Arcos, M. C., Fu, Q., Krause, J., Willerslev, E., Stone, A. C., et al. (2021) · Nature Reviews Methods Primers · doi:10.1038/s43586-020-00011-0 · Cited by 411
Metadata
- Authors
- Fry, E., Kim, S. K., Chigurapti, S., Mika, K. M., Ratan, A., Dammermann, A., Mitchell, B. J., Miller, W., & Lynch, V. J.
- Affiliations
- Department of Human Genetics, The University of Chicago
- Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
- Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia
- Max Perutz Labs, Vienna Biocenter (VBC), University of Vienna, Austria
- Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, Pennsylvania State University
- Department of Biological Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY
- ORCID
- Lynch, Vincent J
- Venue
- Genome Biology and Evolution
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2020-02-07
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 48-58
- ISSN
- 1759-6653
- PMC
- PMC7094797
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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