The Effect of Developmental Pleiotropy on the Evolution of Insect Immune Genes.

The pressure to survive ever-changing pathogen exposure explains the frequent observation that immune genes are among the fastest evolving in the genomes of many taxa, but an intriguing proportion of immune genes also appear to be under purifying selection. Though variance in evolutionary signatures of immune genes is often attributed to differences in gene-specific interactions with microbes, this explanation neglects the possibility that immune genes participate in other biological processes that could pleiotropically constrain adaptive selection. In this study, we analyzed available transcriptomic and genomic data from Drosophila melanogaster and related species to test the hypothesis that there is substantial pleiotropic overlap in the developmental and immunological functions of genes involved in immune signaling and that pleiotropy would be associated with stronger signatures of evolutionary constraint.