Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
The manuscript by Aderounmu presents an interesting attempt to reconstruct evolution of the function of the helicase domain in ancestral Dicers, RNase III enzymes producing siRNAs from long double-stranded RNA and microRNAs from small hairpin precursors. The helicase has a role in long dsRNA recognition and processing and this function could have an antiviral role. Authors show on reconstructed ancestral Dicer variants that the helicase was losing dsRNA binding affinity and ATPase activity during evolution of the lineage leading to vertebrates while an early divergent Dicer-2 variant in Arthropods retained high activity and seemed better adapted for blunt ended long dsRNA, which would be consistent with antiviral function.
The work is consistent with apparent adaptation of vertebrate Dicers for miRNA biogenesis and two known modes of substrate loading: "bottom up" dsRNA threading through the helicase domain where the helicase domain recognizes the end of dsRNA and feeds it into the enzyme and "top-down" where the substrate is first anchored in the PAZ domain before it locks into the enzyme. Some extant Dicer variants are known to be adapted for just one of these two modes while Dicer in C. elegans exemplifies an "ambidextrous" variant. The reconstruction of the helicase domain complex enabled authors to test how well would be ancestral helicases supporting the "bottom up" feeding of long dsRNA and whether the helicase would be distinguishing blunt-end dsRNA and 3' 2 nucleotide overhang. Although the reconstruction of an ancestral protein from highly divergent extant sequences yields just a hypothetical ancestor, which cannot be validated, the work provides remarkable data for interpreting evolutionary history of the helicase domain and RNA silencing in more general. While it is not surprising that the ancestral helicase was a functional ATPase stimulated by dsRNA, particularly new and interesting are data that the decline of the helicase function started already at the level of the common deuterostome ancestor and the helicase was essentially dead in the vertebrate ancestor. It has been reported two decades ago that human Dicer carries a helicase, which has highly conserved critical residues in the ATPase domain but it is non-functional (10.1093/emboj/cdf582). Recently published mouse mutants showed that these highly conserved residues are not important in vivo (10.1016/j.molcel.2022.10.010). Aderounmu et al. now suggest that Dicer carried this dead ATPase with conserved residues for over 500 million years of vertebrate evolution.
I do not have any major comments to the biochemical analyses and while I think that the ancestral protein reconstruction could yield hypothetical sequences, which did not exist, I think they represent reasonable reconstructions, which yielded data worth of interpretations. My major criticism of the work concerns clarity for the readership and interpretations of some results where I wish authors would clarify/revise the text. The following three examples are particularly significant:
1) It should be explained to which common ancestor during metazoan evolution belongs the ancestral helicase AncD1D2 or at least what that sequence might represent in terms of common ancestry during metazoan evolution.
2) This is linked to the first point - authors work with phylogenetic trees reconstructed from a single protein sequence, which are not well aligned with predicted early metazoan divergence (https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0036). While their sequence-based trees show early branching of Dicer-2 as if the two Dicers existed in the common ancestor of almost all animals (except of Placozoa), I do not think there is sufficient support for such a statement, especially since antiviral RNAi-dedicated Dicers evolve faster and Dicer-2 is restricted to a few distant taxonomic group, which might be better explained by independent duplications of ambidextrous ancestral Dicers. I would appreciate if authors would discuss this issue in more detail and make readers more aware of the complexity of the problem.
3) Authors should take more into the account existing literature and data when hypothesizing about sequences of events. Some decline of the helicase activity is apparent in AncD1DEUT suggesting that it initiated between AncD1D2 and AncD1DEUT. This implies that a) antiviral role of Dicer was becoming redundant with other cellular protein sensors by then and b) Dicer was already becoming adapted for miRNA biogenesis, which further progressed in the lineage leading to vertebrates to the unique top-down loading with the distinct pre-dicing state where the helicase forms a rigid arm. Authors even cite Qiao et al. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dci.2021.103997) who report primitive interferon-like system in molluscs - this places the ancestry of the interferon response upstream of AncD1DEUT and suggests that this ancestral protein-based system was taking over antiviral role of Dicer much earlier. In fact, a bit weaker performance of AncD1LOPH/DEUT combined with the aforementioned interferon-like system and massive miRNA expansion in extant molluscs (10.1126/sciadv.add9938) suggests that molluscs possibly followed a convergent path like mammals. While I am missing this kind of discussion in the manuscript, I think that the model where "interferon appears ..." in AncD1VERT (Fig. 6) is incorrect and misleading.

