Click here to close Hello! We notice that you are using Internet Explorer, which is not supported by Echinobase and may cause the site to display incorrectly. We suggest using a current version of Chrome, FireFox, or Safari.
Echinobase
ECB-ART-44620
PeerJ 2016 Jan 01;4:e1876. doi: 10.7717/peerj.1876.
Show Gene links Show Anatomy links

What doesn''t kill them makes them stronger: an association between elongation factor 1-α overdominance in the sea star Pisaster ochraceus and "sea star wasting disease".

Wares JP , Schiebelhut LM .


Abstract
In recent years, a massive mortality event has killed millions of sea stars, of many different species, along the Pacific coast of North America. This disease event, known as ''sea star wasting disease'' (SSWD), is linked to viral infection. In one affected sea star (Pisaster ochraceus), previous work had identified that the elongation factor 1-α locus (EF1A) harbored an intronic insertion allele that is lethal when homozygous yet appears to be maintained at moderate frequency in populations through increased fitness for heterozygotes. The environmental conditions supporting this increased fitness are unknown, but overdominance is often associated with disease. Here, we evaluate populations of P. ochraceus to identify the relationship between SSWD and EF1A genotype. Our data suggest that there may be significantly decreased occurrence of SSWD in individuals that are heterozygous at this locus. These results suggest further studies are warranted to understand the functional relationship between diversity at EF1A and survival in P. ochraceus.

PubMed ID: 27069810
PMC ID: PMC4824914
Article link: PeerJ


Genes referenced: LOC100887844 LOC548620


Article Images: [+] show captions
References [+] :
ALLISON, The distribution of the sickle-cell trait in East Africa and elsewhere, and its apparent relationship to the incidence of subtertian malaria. 1954, Pubmed