Abstract
High-frequency hearing is required for echolocating bats to locate, range and identify objects, yet little is known about its molecular basis. The discovery of a high-frequency hearing-related gene, KCNQ4, provides an opportunity to address this question. Here, we obtain the coding regions of KCNQ4 from 15 species of bats, including echolocating bats that have higher frequency hearing and non-echolocating bats that have the same ability as most other species of mammals. The strongly supported protein-tree resolves a monophyletic group containing all bats with higher frequency hearing and this arrangement conflicts with the phylogeny of bats in which these species are paraphyletic. We identify five parallel evolved sites in echolocating bats belonging to both suborders. The evolutionary trajectories of the parallel sites suggest the independent gain of higher frequency hearing ability in echolocating bats. This study highlights the usefulness of convergent or parallel evolutionary studies for finding phenotype-related genes and contributing to the resolution of evolutionary problems.
Highlights
All echolocating bats have the ability to detect and discriminate high-frequency sound
Parallel Evolution of KCNQ4 in Echolocating Bats We sequenced about 1815 nucleotides of the coding regions of
The gene tree for KCNQ4 was inferred from amino acid sequences using maximum parsimony (MP), maximum likelihood (ML), and Bayesian inference (BI)
Summary
All echolocating bats have the ability to detect and discriminate high-frequency sound. They emit high-frequency calls and use highfrequency hearing to receive echoes from nearby objects, which they can locate. The echolocating bats can detect higher frequencies of sound than non-echolocating bats, which possess the same high-frequency detection ability of most mammals [1]. Bats are subdivided into the suborders Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera based on overwhelming molecular evidence. The former group contains non-laryngeal echolocating Old World fruit bats (family Pteropodidae) plus the superfamily Rhinolophoidea, which uses laryngeal echolocation. Prestin is involved in highfrequency hearing and its gene tree groups all echolocating bats together. Given the complex nature of high-frequency hearing, it is likely that other genes are involved in high-frequency hearing in the echolocating bat owing to the complex critical role it plays
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