The importance of being cis: evolution of orthologous fish and mammalian enhancer activity.

ABSTRACT: Conserved noncoding elements (CNEs) in vertebrate genomes often act as developmental enhancers, but a critical issue is how well orthologous CNE sequences retain the same activity in their respective species, a characteristic important for generalization of model organism studies. To quantify how well CNE enhancer activity has been preserved, we compared the anatomy-specific activities of 41 zebra fish CNEs in zebra fish embryos with the activities of orthologous human CNEs in mouse embryos. We found that 13/41 (∼30%) of the orthologous CNE pairs exhibit conserved positive activity in zebra fish and mouse. Conserved positive activity is only weakly associated with either sequence conservation or the absence of bases undergoing accelerated evolution. A stronger effect is that disparate acti

SUBMITTER: Ritter DI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3107594 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature