Hox gene clusters in blunt snout bream, Megalobrama amblycephala and comparison with those of zebrafish, fugu and medaka genomes.

Hox genes encode transcription factors that play a key role in specifying the body plan in metazoans and are therefore essential in explaining patterns of evolutionary diversity. While each Hox cluster contains the same genes among the different mammalian species, this does not happen in ray-finned fish, in which both the number and organization of Hox genes and even Hox clusters are variables. Here we reveal the organization of Hox genes loci in blunt snout bream. Forty-nine Hox genes including a pseudogene A9b in total have been found in seven clusters as follows: 8 Hox genes in the Aa cluster; 5 in Ab; 10 in Ba; 4 in Bb; 11 in Ca; 4 in Cb; and 7 in Da. In terms of gene content, clusters organization and sequence similarities of putative amino acids, blunt snout bream is more closely related to zebrafish than to fugu and medaka. In contrast to the situation in fugu and medaka, both blunt snout bream and zebrafish have duplicated HoxC cluster but only a single copy of the HoxD cluster. The result implies that the loss of the second HoxD cluster might be a shared feature of the Ostariophysi, to which zebrafish and blunt snout bream both belong. Phylogenetic analysis bases on the paralogous genes from twin clusters supports the duplication-first model, i.e., four original clusters may have duplicated in an event before the divergence of the blunt snout bream-plus-zebrafish lineage and the fugu-plus-medaka lineage. Additionally, the relationship between the decrease of GC level and the loss of conservation and function of one of the paralogous genes from twin clusters is discussed.