selection at a single locus leads to widespread expansion of toxoplasma gondii lineages that are virulent in mice选择在一个位点导致广泛扩张刚地弓形虫毒性小鼠的血统.pdfVIP

Selection at a Single Locus Leads to Widespread Expansion of Toxoplasma gondii Lineages That Are Virulent in Mice 1. 1. 2 3 1 Asis Khan , Sonya Taylor , James W. Ajioka , Benjamin M. Rosenthal , L. David Sibley * 1 Department of Molecular Microbiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America, 2 Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 3 Animal Parasitic Disease Laboratory, Animal and Natural Resources Institute, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland, United States of America Abstract Pathogenicity differences among laboratory isolates of the dominant clonal North American and European lineages of Toxoplasma gondii are largely controlled by polymorphisms and expression differences in rhoptry secretory proteins (ROPs). However, the extent to which such differences control virulence in natural isolates of T. gondii, including those from more diverse genetic backgrounds, is uncertain. We elucidated the evolutionary history and functional consequences of diversification in the serine/threonine kinase ROP18, a major virulence determinant in the mouse model. We characterized the extent of sequence polymorphism and the evolutionary forces acting on ROP18 and several antigen-encoding genes within a large collection of natural isolates, comparing them to housekeeping genes and introns. Surprisingly, despite substantial genetic diversity between lineages, we identified just three principal alleles of ROP18, which had very ancient ancestry compared to other sampled loci. Expression and allelic differences between these three alleles of ROP18 accounted