| Functional |
"(…) both frugivorous bats in our dataset, the black flying fox and large flying fox, have lost several genes that are specifically expressed in the kidney and are involved in renal secretion and reabsorption processes" |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |
| Methodology & Validation |
"For a gene to be classified as lost, we require that a lineage, which descends from an ancestor with an intact gene, exhibits several gene-inactivating mutations that most likely result in a non-functional protein. As gene-inactivating mutations, we consider frameshifting insertions and deletions, inframe stop codon mutations, and splice site-disrupting mutations. In addition, we consider the loss of exons or even entire genes, which could occur due to either large deletions in the genome or the accumulation of numerous mutations that destroy any sequence similarity. For all previously unknown gene losses presented here, we further confirmed the loss by validating the gene-inactivating mutations with unassembled sequencing reads from the respective species." |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |
| Timing of Loss |
"Shared inactivating mutations (asterisks) show that AQP6 was already lost the common ancestor of both fruit bats." |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |
| Phenotypic |
"Fruit bats have lost the AQP6 gene that is the only known aquaporin that does not function as a water channel but rather as an anion channel." |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |