A Comparative Genomic and Transcriptional Survey Providing Novel Insights into Bone Morphogenetic Protein 2 () in Fishes.

Intermuscular bones (IBs) are only found in the muscles of fish. Bone morphogenetic protein 2 (bmp2) is considered to be the most active single osteogenesis factor. It promotes cell proliferation and differentiation during bone repair, as well as inducing the formation of bones and cartilages in vivo. However, detailed investigations of this family in fish are incredibly limited. Here, we have used a variety of published and unpublished sequences for teleosts and cartilage fish in order to explore and expand our understanding of genes in fish. Our results confirmed that teleost genomes contain two or more genes, and the diversity of genes in vertebrates appears to be as a result of a combination of whole genome duplication (WGD) and gene loss. Differences were also observed in tissue distribution and relative transcription abundance of the through a transcriptomic analysis. Our data also indicated that may play an important role in the formation of IBs in teleosts. In addition, protein sequence alignments and 3D structural predictions of and supported their similar roles in fishes. To summarize, our existing work provided novel insights into the family genes in fishes through a mixture of comparative genomic and transcriptomic analysis.