Evidence of positive selection at codon sites localized in extracellular domains of mammalian CC motif chemokine receptor proteins

In mammals, the majority of chemokine receptor genes are clustered together; in humans, seven of the ten genes are clustered in the 3p21-24 chromosome region. Gene conversion events, or exchange of DNA sequence between genes, have been reported in chemokine receptor paralogs in various mammalian lineages, especially between the cytogenetically closely located pairs CCR2/5 and CCR1/3. Datasets of mammalian orthologs for each gene were analyzed separately to minimize the potential confounding impact of analyzing highly similar sequences resulting from gene conversion events.Molecular evolution approaches and the software package Phylogenetic Analyses by Maximum Likelihood (PAML) were utilized to investigate the signature of selection that has acted on the mammalian CC chemokine receptor (CCR) gene family. The results of neutral vs. adaptive evolution (positive selection) hypothesis testing using Site Models are reported. In general, positive selection is defined by a ratio of nonsynonymous/synonymous nucleotide changes (dN/dS, or ω) >1.Of the ten mammalian CC motif chemokine receptor sequence datasets analyzed, only CCR2 and CCR3 contain amino acid codon sites that exhibit evidence of positive selection using site based hypothesis testing in PAML. Nineteen of the twenty codon sites putatively indentified as likely to be under positive selection code for amino acid residues located in extracellular domains of the receptor protein products.These results suggest that amino acid residues present in intracellular and membrane-bound domains are more selectively constrained for functional signal transduction and homo- or heterodimerization, whereas amino acid residues in extracellular domains of these receptor proteins evolve more quickly, perhaps due to heightened selective pressure resulting from ligand-binding and pathogen interactions of extracellular domains.Chemotactic or chemoattractant cytokine (chemokine) proteins are a unique division of cytokines characterized by