Prestin and high frequency hearing in mammals.

Recent evidence indicates that the evolution of ultrasonic hearing in echolocating bats and cetaceans has involved adaptive amino acid replacements in the cochlear gene prestin. A substantial number of these changes have occurred in parallel in both groups, suggesting that particular amino acid residues might confer greater auditory sensitivity to high frequencies. Here we review some of these findings, and consider whether similar signatures of prestin protein sequence evolution also occur in mammals that possess high frequency hearing for passive localization and conversely, whether this gene has undergone less change in mammals that lack high frequency hearing.