Mosaic cis-regulatory evolution drives transcriptional partitioning of HERVH endogenous retrovirus in the human embryo.

ABSTRACT: The human endogenous retrovirus type-H (HERVH) family is expressed in the preimplantation embryo. A subset of these elements are specifically transcribed in pluripotent stem cells where they appear to exert regulatory activities promoting self-renewal and pluripotency. How HERVH elements achieve such transcriptional specificity remains poorly understood. To uncover the sequence features underlying HERVH transcriptional activity, we performed a phyloregulatory analysis of the long terminal repeats (LTR7) of the HERVH family, which harbor its promoter, using a wealth of regulatory genomics data. We found that the family includes at least eight previously unrecognized subfamilies that have been active at different timepoints in primate evolution and display distinct expression patterns during

SUBMITTER: Carter TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8912925 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature