Highly conserved syntenic blocks at the vertebrate Hox loci and conserved regulatory elements within and outside Hox gene clusters.

ABSTRACT: Hox genes in vertebrates are clustered, and the organization of the clusters has been highly conserved during evolution. The conservation of Hox clusters has been attributed to enhancers located within and outside the Hox clusters that are essential for the coordinated "temporal" and "spatial" expression patterns of Hox genes in developing embryos. To identify evolutionarily conserved regulatory elements within and outside the Hox clusters, we obtained contiguous sequences for the conserved syntenic blocks from the seven Hox loci in fugu and carried out a systematic search for conserved noncoding sequences (CNS) in the human, mouse, and fugu Hox loci. Our analysis has uncovered unusually large conserved syntenic blocks at the HoxA and HoxD loci. The conserved syntenic blocks at the human a

SUBMITTER: Lee AP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1459007 | biostudies-literature | 2006 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature