A universal nonmonotonic relationship between gene compactness and expression levels in multicellular eukaryotes.

ABSTRACT: Analysis of gene architecture and expression levels of four organisms, Homo sapiens, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, and Arabidopsis thaliana, reveals a surprising, nonmonotonic, universal relationship between expression level and gene compactness. With increasing expression level, the genes tend at first to become longer but, from a certain level of expression, they become more and more compact, resulting in an approximate bell-shaped dependence. There are two leading hypotheses to explain the compactness of highly expressed genes. The selection hypothesis predicts that gene compactness is predominantly driven by the level of expression, whereas the genomic design hypothesis predicts that expression breadth across tissues is the driving force. We observed the connection b

SUBMITTER: Carmel L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2817431 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature