A premature stop codon in the CYP2C19 gene may explain the unexpected sensitivity of vultures to diclofenac toxicity

Abstract

The unintended environmental exposure of vultures to diclofenac has resulted in the deaths of millions of old-world vultures on the Asian subcontinent. While toxicity has been since associated with a long half-life of elimination and zero order metabolism, the actual constraint in biotransformation is yet to be clarified. For this study we evaluated if the evident zero order metabolism could be due to defects in the CYP2C9/2C19 enzyme system. For this, using whole genome sequencing and de-novo transcriptome alignment, the vulture CYP2C19 open reading frame was identified through Splign analysis. The result sequence analysis revealed the presence of a premature stop codon on intron 7 of the identified open reading frame. Even if the stop codon was not present, amino acid residue analysis tended to suggest that the enzyme would be lower in activity than the equivalent human enzyme, with differences present at sites 105, 286 and 289. The defect was also conserved across the eight non-related vultures tested. From these results, we conclude that the sensitivity of the old-world vultures to diclofenac is due to the non-expression of a viable CYP2C19 enzyme system. This is not too dissimilar to the effects seen in certain people with a similar defective enzyme.