Molecular convergence and transgenic evidence suggest a single origin of laryngeal echolocation in bats

The laryngeal echolocation is regarded as one of the conspicuous traits that play major roles in flourishing bats. Whether the laryngeal echolocation in bats originated once, however, is still controversial. We here address this question by performing molecular convergence analyses between ancestral...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:iScience
Main Authors: Liu, Zhen, Chen, Peng, Xu, Dong-Ming, Qi, Fei-Yan, Guo, Yuan-Ting, Liu, Qi, Bai, Jing, Zhou, Xin, Shi, Peng
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2022
Subjects:
Article
toothed whales
Online Access:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8980745/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104114
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Summary:The laryngeal echolocation is regarded as one of the conspicuous traits that play major roles in flourishing bats. Whether the laryngeal echolocation in bats originated once, however, is still controversial. We here address this question by performing molecular convergence analyses between ancestral branches of bats and toothed whales. Compared with controls, the molecular convergences were enriched in hearing-related genes for the last common ancestor of bats (LCAB) and extant echolocating bats, but not for the LCA of Old World fruit bats (LCAP). And the convergent hearing gene prestin of the LCAB and the extant echolocating bats functionally converged. More importantly, the high-frequency hearing of the LCAP-prestin knock-in mice decreased with lower cochlear outer hair cell function compared with the LCAB-prestin knock-in mice. Together, our findings provide multiple lines of evidence suggesting a single origin of laryngeal echolocation in the LCAB and the subsequent loss in the LCAP.

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