Evolutionarily conserved non-coding genomic sequences represent a potentially rich source for the discovery of gene regulatory regions. Since these elements are subject to stabilizing selection they evolve much slower than adjacent non-functional DNA. These so-called phylogenetic footprints can be detected by comparison of the sequences surrounding orthologous genes in different species. In this paper we present a new method and an effcient software tool for the identifcation of corresponding footprints in long sequences from multiple species. This allows the evolutionary study of the origin and loss of phylogenetic footprints if suffcient number and appropriately placed species are included. We apply this method to the published sequences of HoxA clusters of shark, human, and the duplicated zebrafish and Takifugu clusters as well as the published HoxB cluster sequences. We find that there is a massive loss of sequence conservation in the intergenic region of the HoxA clusters, consistent with the finding in [Chiu et al., PNAS 99, 5492-5497 (2002)]. We further propose a simple model to estimate the loss of sequence conservation that can be attributed to gene loss and other structural reasons. We find that the loss of conservation after cluster duplication is more extensive than expected by this model. This suggests that binding site turnover and/or adaptive modification may also contribute to the loss of sequence conservation. We conclude that this method is suitable for the large scale study of the evolution of (putative) cis-regulatory elements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:31997 |
| Date | 24 October 2018 |
| Creators | Prohaska, Sonja J., Fried, Claudia, Flamm, Christoph, Wagner, Günther P., Stadler, Peter F. |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 1055-7903 |
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