The evolutionary divergence of neurotransmitter receptors and second-messenger pathways

Members of the superfamily of G-protein-coupled neurotransmitter receptors have a conserved secondary structure, a moderate and reasonably steady rate of sequence change, and usually lack introns within the coding sequence. These properties are advantageous for evolutionary studies. The duplication and divergence of the genes in this gene family led to the formation of distinct neurotransmitter pathways and may have facilitated the evolution of complex nervous systems. I have analyzed this evolutionary divergence by quantitative multiple sequence alignment, bootstrap resampling, and statistical analysis of 49 adrenergic, muscarinic cholinergic, dopamine, and octopamine receptor sequences from 12 animal species. The results indicate that the first event to occur within this gene family was the divergence of the catecholamine receptors from the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, which occurred prior to the divergence of the arthropod and vertebrate lineages. Subsequently, the ability to activate specific second-messenger pathways diverged independently in both the muscarinic and the catecholamine receptors. This appears to have occurred after the divergence of the arthropod and vertebrate lineages but before the divergence of the avian and mammalian lineages. However, the second-messenger pathways activated by adrenergic and dopamine receptors did not diverge independently. Rather, the ability of the catecholamine receptors to bind to specific ligands, such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, or octopamine, was repeatedly modified in evolutionary history, and in some cases was modified after the divergence of the second-messenger pathways.