Widespread turnover of a conserved cis-regulatory code across 589 grass species.

ABSTRACT: The growing availability of genomes from non-model organisms offers new opportunities to identify functional loci underlying trait variation through comparative genomics. While cis-regulatory regions drive much of phenotypic evolution, linking them to specific functions remains challenging. We identified 514 cis-regulatory motifs enriched in regulatory regions of five diverse grass species, with 73% consistently enriched across all, suggesting a deeply conserved regulatory code. Leveraging 57 new contig-level genome assemblies, we then quantified shared occupancy of specific motif instances within gene-proximal regions across 589 grass species, revealing widespread gain and loss over evolutionary time. Shared occupancy declined rapidly over the first few million years of divergence, yet ∼5

SUBMITTER: Hale CO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12819352 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature