Figure 6.

A potential role for the minor spliceosome in domestication. (A) A model demonstrating how tissue size can be controlled through progenitor cell proliferation. (B) Evidence for tissue size reduction upon impairment of minor intron splicing/minor intron-containing gene (MIG) expression. i) Plant size is smaller in A. thaliana upon knockdown of the minor spliceosome-specific U11/U12-65K. Reproduced with permission from Jung and Kang, 2014. ii) Mutations in RNU4ATAC cause three diseases in human, such as microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type 1 (MOPD1), wherein patients’ display reductions in multiple tissues causing a severely reduced body plan relative to healthy controls (theoretical output). iii) Previous studies suggest a link between reduced minor intron splicing/MIG expression and domestication syndrome, of which one prominent example is the domestication of dog (beige) from wolf (black). (C) Pie-chart representing the distribution of candidate domestication genes (CDGs) from dog, cat, cattle, horse, and anatomically modern human curated from Theofanopoulou et al. (2017) that are unique to one species (light purple), overlap in two species (blue), or are shared among three species (dark purple). (D) Pie-chart showing the number of MIGs (green) or non-MIGs (gray) found within the list of CDGs shared between two (top) or three (bottom) species. (E) Pie-chart showing the number of essential (yellow) or non-essential (gray) genes found within the list of CDGs shared between two (top) or three (bottom) species. (F) Description of gene enrichment (as determined through g:Profiler) for essential genes shared among two or three species (only one gene, RNPC3, is both essential and a shared CDG among three species). Significance determined by Fisher’s exact test; * P < 0.05.