Uneven evolutionary rates of bradykinin B1 and B2 receptors in vertebrate lineages

Bradykinin acts through two receptor subtypes in mammals and generates a variety of responses including pain, inflammation and hypotension. The evolutionary history of the bradykinin system has been unclear due to shortage of information outside mammals. We describe here two receptor subtypes and the bradykinin precursor in three species of bony fish (the zebrafish Danio rerio, the Japanese pufferfish Takifugu rubripes, and the green spotted pufferfish Tetraodon nigroviridis) and chicken and analyze the relationships to mammals by a combination of phylogeny, conserved synteny and exon-intron organization. All of these species have two receptor genes located close to each other in a tandem formation, with the B2 gene 5' to the B1 gene, in chromosomal regions displaying conserved synteny between the species (albeit conservation of synteny in zebrafish is still unclear due to poor genome assembly). The evolutionary rate differs between the two genes as well as between lineages leading to differing pharmacological properties for both B1 and B2 across vertebrate classes. Also the bradykinin precursor gene was identified in all of these species in a chromosome region with conserved synteny. The tissue distribution of mRNA in T. rubripes is similar for B1 and B2, suggesting more similar regulation for the two genes than in mammals. In conclusion, the receptor tandem duplication predates the divergence of ray-finned fish and tetrapods and no additional duplicates of the receptors or bradykinin seem to have survived the ray-finned fish tetraploidization.