Housekeeping genes tend to show reduced upstream sequence conservation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Understanding the constraints that operate in mammalian gene promoter sequences is of key importance to understand the evolution of gene regulatory networks. The level of promoter conservation varies greatly across orthologous genes, denoting differences in the strength of the evolutionary constraints. Here we test the hypothesis that the number of tissues in which a gene is expressed is related in a significant manner to the extent of promoter sequence conservation.

Results

We show that mammalian housekeeping genes, expressed in all or nearly all tissues, show significantly lower promoter sequence conservation, especially upstream of position -500 with respect to the transcription start site, than genes expressed in a subset of tissues. In addition, we evaluate t

SUBMITTER: Farre D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2323216 | biostudies-literature | 2007

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature