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Comparing nematode enhancers: conservation, divergence, and co‐evolution
Author(s) -
Ruvinsky Ilya
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.902.4
Subject(s) - enhancer , biology , conserved sequence , genome , sequence (biology) , computational biology , evolutionary biology , caenorhabditis elegans , divergence (linguistics) , gene , genetics , base sequence , transcription factor , linguistics , philosophy
A major motivation behind the hundreds of genome projects is the notion that functionally important elements tend to evolve more slowly than other sequences, and can therefore be revealed by sequence comparisons. Comparative approaches have been highly successful in the past, but are we capturing the entire complexity of evolving genomes? We are using Caenorhabditis nematodes to address this question. We are combining sequence comparisons with direct experimental tests of functional conservation of orthologous enhancers. We find considerable disparity in the rates of sequence change in enhancers of co‐regulated genes and a poor correlation between sequence and functional divergence. While not completely negating the maxim “if conserved then functional and if functional then conserved”, our results suggest a greater role for relatively rapid and extensive co‐evolution within enhancers and between them and transcription factors. In turn, this suggests that a more nuanced approach will be required to extract information from comparative sequence data. This work was supported in part by grants from the NIH and NSF.