Journal of Heredity Advance Access originally published online on September 16, 2008
Journal of Heredity 2008 99(6):647-652; doi:10.1093/jhered/esn073
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Brief Communications |
Evolution and Differentiation of the Prion Protein Gene (PRNP) among Species
From the Department of Animal Science, College of Animal Science and Technology, Agricultural University of Hebei, Baoding 071001, China
Address correspondence to Li Xianglong at the address above, or e-mail: lixianglongcn{at}yahoo.com.
A total of 937 prion protein gene (PRNP) sequences belonging to 83 species in 56 genera of 26 families were analyzed in order to investigate its evolution and differentiation among species. The length of PRNP coding sequence for all species analyzed varied from 567 to 825 bp, which was mainly because of insertion or deletion in the repeat region within and among the species. TGA and TAG are the main stop codons in the PRNP gene. Bos taurus had the smallest variation in terms of average number of nucleotide differences (0.811), nucleotide diversity (0.0011), and nonsynonymous nucleotide diversity (0.0002) among all the ruminants. The reconstructed phylogenetic tree of PRNP of families and species was basically consistent with the taxonomy of National Center for Biotechnology Information except for Felidae (Felis catus), which was initially clustered with Moschidae rather than Mustelidae or Canidae.
Key Words: bovine spongiform encephalopathy interspecies comparison scrapie sequences TSEs
Corresponding Editor: Susan Lamont
Received September 3, 2007
Accepted July 31, 2008