| Functional |
"(…) fruit bats have lost two genes involved in insulin metabolism and signaling (FAM3B and FFAR3) that may contribute to metabolic adaptations to their sugar rich diet." |
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 |
"Several shared inactivating mutations (asterisks) show that FFAR3 was already lost in the ancestor of both fruit bats." |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |
| Phenotypic |
"The loss of FFAR3 may contribute to the ability of fruit bats to secrete significantly more insulin (16% of the total insulin islet content) than mice, rats or human (1–2%)." |
10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1 |