A conserved phenylalanine motif among Teleost fish provides insight for improving electromagnetic perception
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Abstract
Magnetoreceptive biology as a field remains relatively obscure; compared to the breadth of species believed to sense magnetic fields, it remains under-studied. Here, we present grounds for the expansion of magnetoreception studies among Teleosts. We begin with the electromagnetic perceptive gene (EPG) from Kryptopterus vitreolus and expand to identify 72 Teleosts with homologous proteins containing a conserved three-phenylalanine (3F) motif. Phylogenetic analysis provides insight as to how EPG may have evolved over time, and indicates that certain clades may have experienced a loss of function driven by different fitness pressures. One potential factor is water type with freshwater fish significantly more likely to possess the functional motif version (FFF), and saltwater fish to have the non-functional variant (FXF). It was also revealed that when the 3F motif from the homolog of Brachyhypopomus gauderio (B.g.) is inserted into EPG – EPG(B.g.) – the response (as indicated by increased intracellular calcium) is faster. This indicates that EPG has the potential to be engineered to improve upon its response and increase its utility to be used as a controller for specific outcomes.
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Abstract
This was a really interesting and fun read! Congrats to the authors.
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EPG has shown response to magnetic stimuli in mammalian cells in the form of increased intracellular calcium
Has most of this work been done in Kryptopterus vitreolus? If so (and i make the same comment below) it would be very helpful to make it clear when you are talking about EPG generally vs results from EPG from KV specifically.
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3F motif of EPG
In this section it would be very helpful to label the "WT" EPG as EPG-KV (Kryptopterus vitreolus)
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It becomes clear that the F in positions 1 and 10 are highly conserved, but the F in position 7 has some variability.
Interesting that function loss occurs only through loss of the central F in the FXF motif. If the selection is just for loss of function of the EPG protein, I would imagine that this could be achieved in many different ways such as mutating F in position 1 or 10, or by adding premature stop codons in the sequence. Do you think that EPG performs a alternative function that is being maintained, even while the magnetoreceptive abilities are being selected against?
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In this case, tblastn returned 62 unique species that express a protein with high sequence homology to EPG. An additional 10 species with EPG homologs in their genomes were either discovered in the EFISH Genomics database, or uncovered by manually searching unannotated genomes within NCBI databases of species in the same genus as others with an EPG homolog.
It wasn't clear to me from this analysis what rough % of fish have a EPG homolog. Is EPG ever lost? If so, this could help out your trait association analysis by adding more fish that are functionally EPG negative.
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