Comparative analysis of period genes in teleost fish genomes

Period (Per) is a canonical circadian clock gene. The fruit fly, an invertebrate, has one per gene, while the human, a tetrapod vertebrate, has three Per genes. Per1, Per2, and Per3 of the tetrapods were generated from two rounds of ancient genome duplications from the ancestral chordate Per gene. Searching for five teleost fish genomes in a combination of phylogenetic, splicing site, and syntenic analyses revealed that zebrafish have two per1 genes, per1a and per1b, one per2, and one per3; medaka, fugu, and tetraodon each have two per2 genes, per2a and per2b, one per1, and one per3; sticklebacks also have per2a, per2b, and one per1 but lack per3; and per1a/per1b in zebrafish and per2a/per2b in madaka, fugu, tetraodon, and stickleback are ancient duplicates. While the dN/dS ratios of the five fish per duplicates are all <1, suggesting that they likely have been subject to purifying selection, the Tajima relative rate test showed that zebrafish per1a/per1b and fugu and medaka per2a/per2b have asymmetric evolutionary rates, implicating that one of these duplicates might have been under positive selection or relaxed functional constraint. Further, in situ hybridization showed that zebrafish per1a and per1b clearly have distinct patterns of temporal and spatial expression. These results support the notion that extra copies of teleost per genes were generated from the fish-specific genome duplication, and divergent resolution after the duplication resulted in retention of different per duplicates in different fish, most of which have diverged significantly.