Hox genes are important in forming the anterior-posterior body axis pattern in the early developmental stage of animals. The conserved nature of the genomic organization of Hox genes is well known in diverse metazoans. To understand the Hox gene architecture in human-infecting Taenia tapeworms, we conducted a genomic survey of the Hox gene using degenerative polymerase chain reaction primers in Taenia asiatica. Six Hox gene orthologs from 276 clones were identified. Comparative analysis revealed that T. asiatica has six Hox orthologs, including two lab/Hox1, two Hox3, one Dfd/Hox4, and one Lox2/Lox4. The results suggest that Taenia Hox genes may have undergone independent gene duplication in two Hox paralogs. The failure to detect Post1/2 orthologs in T. asiatica may suggest that sequence divergence or the secondary loss of the posterior genes has occurred in the lineage leading to the cestode and trematode.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper are available in the GenBank, EMBL, and DDBJ databases under accession nos. DQ069784 and DQ387457-387461.
This work was supported by the KRIBB Research Initiative Program and the Bioinfrastructure Program of the Korea Ministry of Science and Technology. Parasite materials used in this study were provided by the Parasite Resource Bank of Korea National Research Resource Center (R21-2005-000-10007-0), Republic of Korea.
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Kim, KH., Lee, Y.S., Jeon, HK. et al. Hox Genes from the Tapeworm Taenia asiatica (Platyhelminthes: Cestoda). Biochem Genet 45, 335–343 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10528-007-9078-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10528-007-9078-x