Image by wallyg via Flickr Can you say this 5 times quickly, “secreted sushi containing SRPX2 as a source of sylvian seizures seems like a spandrel” ? Well, if you can, you might say thanks to your FOXP2 gene (much ado recently), but of course its important to say thanks to so many other co-evolutionary substitutions. A recent article by Royer et al. (doi:10.1186/1471-2156-8-72) examines the recent evolution of the SRPX2 gene and found an R75K change that marks a human-primate split and also occurs in an important functional loop of the first sushi domain of SRPX2 (one that carries a mutation that is responsible for sylvian seizures involving oral and speech dyspraxia). Although they did not find evidence for positive selection, its easy to suspect that Lysine-75 plays an important supporting role in our tongue-twisting skills.
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Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me 