Zhuo-Cheng Hou

TL;DR: It is proposed that placenta-specific galectins reduce the danger of maternal immune attacks on the fetal semiallograft, presumably conferring additional immune tolerance mechanisms and in turn sustaining hemochorial placentation during the long gestation of anthropoid primates.

TL;DR: Parsimony- and codon model-based phylogenetic analysis of coding sequences show that amino acid replacements occurred in early mammalian evolution on key residues, including gain of cysteines, which regulate immune functions by redox status-mediated conformational changes that disable sugar binding and dimerization, and that the acquired immunoregulatory functions of galectin-1 then became highly conserved in eutherian lineages.

TL;DR: Inference of phylogenetically conserved and derived transcripts demonstrates the power of comparative transcriptomics to trace placenta evolution and variation across mammals and identified candidate genes that may be important in the normal function of the human Placenta, and their dysfunction may be related to human pregnancy complications.

TL;DR: There is evidence that 94 of these 222 genes evolved adaptively during human evolutionary history since the time of the last common ancestor of eutherian mammals, suggesting that ancient adaptations have been retained in the human placenta.

TL;DR: Maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses of the combined and individual gene phylogenies strongly support a sister grouping of cow and horse to the exclusion of dog although topology tests could not rule out a horse and dog sister group relationship.