Conservation Analysis Showing High Variability in the Rate of Evolution of Regeneration-related Genes

Schmidtea mediterranea has a high regeneration ability. Previous studies have discovered genes contributing to this species' regeneration ability, including genes with orthologs in human. However, no previous comparative studies have investigated these orthologs across a diversity of species. Understanding how the regeneration-related genes evolved in a diverse range of extant species is helpful to both the biological and medical field. Here I reported conservation measurements, pairwise dN/dS, of regeneration-related genes generated from 12 species against human. I then compared them to the pairwise dN/dS of housekeeping under the same criteria and found that the evolution process of genes related to regeneration varies across species and was less conserved than the housekeeping genes, indicating a less evolutionary constraint over regeneration-related genes.