Flying Primates Revisited: DNA Hybridization with Fractionated, GC-Enriched DNA
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South African Journal of Science Vol. 91 September 1995 JOHN T. ROBINSON FESTSCHRIFT 477 :Flying primates revisited: DNA hybridization with fractionated, GC-enriched DNA John D. PettigreW' and John A.W. Kirsch2 'Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre, University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia and 2Department of Zoology and Zoology Museum, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53705, USA. Molecular studies have been brought to bear on the primates from other mammalian orders. I I The finding of all of debate over the nature of the evolutionary links between these shared derived brain characters in flying foxes and pri primates and bats. The present investigation supports the mates, but not in microbats, resurrects the old notions about fly view that base composition is important in understanding ing primates. It is very hard to explain how these sophisticated phylogenetic relationships. Our discovery that some bats brain characters appeared independently in flying foxes and pri have extreme base compositional biases in their DNA com mates. The selective forces that would bring about such simila pared to others may help in understanding the origin of rity in functionally-separate brain systems are obscure. More these biases. over, with time, more and more examples of shared derived brain characters have been found linking primates and flying foxes A link between primates and bats has a long history. Linnaeus' (see review of this by Pettigrew(2). In other words, it is becoming placed bats into his Order Primates on the basis of anatomical increasingly unparsimonious to suggest that the primate brain features like the pendulous penis and axillary breasts that are characters that are also found in flying foxes have evolved inde shared by primates and some bats. Later debates led to the pendently. The alternative explanation, that flying foxes share a removal of bats from the primates, largely on the basis of the common ancestry with primates which is more recent than either increasing information made available about the peculiarities of shares with the microbats, is highly controversial because of its the microbats as these acoustically-specialized mammals became implications for the origin of flight. Accepting this 'flying pri l more familiar to anatomists (cf. Leche2 vs. Winge ). It is interest mate' hypothesis has the corollary that flight has evolved in ing to note that all of the characters which were used by Winge) mammals on two separate occasions. The striking similarities to remove bats from the primates were features that we now between the flying apparatus of the two kinds of bats would then know are confined to Microchiroptera, but are not found in flying have arisen from the constraints that operate on the hand wing foxes. There are thus two independent concepts here: I) that bats system, such as the need to use all digits to support the wing . ) may have a special relationship to primates; and 2) that the membrane in the absence of structural elements like feathers or 0 1 Microchiroptera and Megachiroptera may not have had a com actinofibrillae that were useful in the construction of the avian 0 2 and pterosaurian hand wings, respectively. In this regard it is of mon origin from the same flying ancestor. If proposition 2 is true, d interest that a simple measurement on the digital bones of the e then primate-bat affinities may have been confused by trying to t a include microbats along with flying foxes. hand wings of microbats and flying foxes can separate these two d ( In more recent times, these same ideas have been debated kinds of wings unambiguously.7 Moreover, the derived state of r e heatedly. In the 1970s there was a well-known, but unpublished, this skeletal feature of the hand is shared by primates and flying h s i foxes, but not microbats. l debate between Carl Koopman and James Dale Smith on this b same question, with the issue remaining largely unresolved. Molecular studies have been brought to bear on this debate. At u P Smith"·j had raised the remarkable similarities between flying present the consensus is that DNA sequence data failed to sup e h foxes and primates. He questioned whether the similarities in port a special link between flying foxes and primates. In contrast, t t3 y wing structure between the two suborders of bats might not rep the amino acid sequence data from lens alpha crystallin, b resent a case of convergent evolution, a result of the considerable haemoglobin7 and epitopes on serum proteins," all tend to sup d e t constraints that are known to operate upon flight surfaces, rather port separate origins of the two kinds of bats. Possible reasons n than reflecting a common flying ancestor as was usually for this discrepancy between the interpretation of protein and a r '2 '5 g assumed. This idea has been taken seriously by some laboratories DNA data have been laid down elsewhere. Of special interest e c engaged in the study of flight mechanics of bats (e.g. Scholey"). in this regard is the fact that flying fox DNA has the most biased n e New evidence on this controversial question of bat-primate base composition known in vertebrates. This is manifest as a dra c i l matic increase in the proportion of DNA that is taken up by A or affinities appeared in the 80s from studies of the brain. A number r T substitutions, with the DNA of all megabats having around e of derived brain characters, thought to be uniquely shared among d 75% AT content. 16 A marked AT bias is also present in the DNA n the primates, were found in flying foxes. Such characters include u the pattern of lamination in the lateral geniculate nucleus where of some microbat families, although none has such a strong bias y a the magno-cellular layers are well differentiated and lie external as the flying foxes. 17 In view of this large bias in the base compo w e to the other layers in the nucleus next to the optic tract.1 Another sition of DNA, it seems possible that work using DNA to estab t a set of characters is found in the projection from the retina to the lish affinities between the bats could be affected by coincidental G similarities in AT substitutions. In support of this idea it was t mid-brain optic tectum. Of the large number of mammalian e found that the substitutions claimed in support of a link between n orders that has been studied, only in primates and flying foxes i b does one find a hemi-decussated pattern of projection to the mid flying foxes and microbats have a preponderance of A or T by a a 15 S 1 to factor of 4. brain tectum which mimics that to the thalamus. - Other charac y b ters in the motor pathways and the organization of the multiple In the present study we aimed to address this possible AT bias d representations of sensory fields within the cortex as well as the in the DNA of bats by fractionating DNA to enrich the content of e c disposition of sub-divisions of the hippocampus, all distinguish GC, and then undertake DNA-DNA hybridization studies with u d o r p e R 478 JOHN T. ROBINSON FESTSCHRIFT South African Journal of Science Vol. 91 September 1995 Fig. I. The flying primate hypothesis. Literal and metaphor ical tree of primates and relatives to illustrate the hypothesis that flying foxes (megabats, lower right) had a separate evolu tionary origin, via the dermopteran colugo (gliding mammal to the left of the flying fox), from the origin that gave rise to the other branch of flying mammals, the micro bats (far left). When this drawing was commissioned, one of us believed that the tarsier had strong affinities with anthropoids (top right branch), but new evidence suggests that the tarsier is para phyletic to all living primates, illustrating that primate rela tionships are still not agreed, even when one puts aside the controversy over the possible derivation of flying foxes from an early branch of the primate tree. 1, Bushbaby; 2, Ruffed lemur; 3, Colobus monkey; 4, Tarsier; 5, Flying fox; 6, Tree shrew; 7, Gliding lemur; 8, Microbats. the enriched DNA fraction. In this way we hoped to achieve two aging for plant products and that stiff competition for the ) 0 goals. First, we hoped to improve resolution at great distances phytophagous resources might make life difficult for the gliders 1 0 where the low temperature of the melting point of heteroduplexes in the presence of their actively flying descendant. This 'just so' 2 tends to obscure relationships. By using GC-rich DNA that melts evolutionary story fits the scanty fossil evidence that is available d e t at a higher temperature we hoped to 'pull' these curves to higher for these groups in that the first definitive flying fox fossil, a d temperature ranges and, if possible, better resolutions. Second, Archaeopteropus, appears near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, ( r we aimed to see whether the use of GC-rich DNA gave the same around the time when the paromomyid gliders disappear from e h relationships between the bats that were seen with unfractionated the fossil record. The fact that the living colugo is a primary foli s i l DNA. If the AT bias is playing a role in artificially shortening vore and can therefore avoid competition with flower-, nectar, b u distances between bats because of a common AT bias, then one and fruit-eating flying foxes is also consistent with this view.