What is phylogeny?
Phylogeny describes the evolutionary relationships and ancestry between biological entities. In the case of OPA3, we are tracing the protein's relationship between different species by utilizing its amino acid sequence to create the phylogenetic trees shown below. These phylogenetic trees visually display the relatedness of the OPA3 protein in different organisms. For example, the Homo sapiens OPA3 protein is very closely related to Pan troglodytes and Pongo pygmaeus (chimpanzee and orangutan).
How to read a phylogenetic tree
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Why is phylogeny important?
Understanding how OPA3 is related across species can help us to better understand the disease and how to study it. Because OPA3 is present in many different species, it is evolutionarily conserved and therefore likely has an important function. Additionally, to research OPA3 we need to have model organisms that carry the gene so that we can perform experiments to learn more about Autosomal Dominant Optic Atrophy.
OPA3 Protein Phylogenetic Trees
Figures 1-4 Generated in Mega11 [1]. Each tree has a different alignment or tree construction method that has produced slight variations in the relationships between the species. The small numbers near the nodes are the percentages of confidence determined from the bootstrapping procedure.
Discussion
Based on the generated phylogenetic trees we can infer how related OPA3 is between species and visualize how conserved the protein sequence is across species. While the gene is not present in lower model organisms such as yeast or Arabidopsis, it is conserved in Latimeria chalumnae, an ancient species. OPA3 is a very well conserved gene that likely has an important role as it is present in numerous different species. In combination with the results from the domain analysis, we can conclude that OPA3 is present in multiple model organisms, including Danio rerio (Zebrafish).
This web page was produced as an assignment for Genetics 564, a capstone course at UW-Madison.
References
Figure 1. Generated in Mega 11 software, accessed April 7th, 2024.
Image of phylogenetic tree labels made in Biorender, access April 7th, 2024 from Scientific Image and Illustration Software | BioRender