Erives Albert, Levine Michael
Center for Integrative Genomics, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Division of Genetics and Development, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Mar 16;101(11):3851-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0400611101.
The evolution of animal diversity depends on changes in the regulation of a relatively fixed set of protein-coding genes. To understand how these changes might arise, we examined the organization of shared sequence motifs in four coordinately regulated neurogenic enhancers that direct similar patterns of gene expression in the early Drosophila embryo. All four enhancers possess similar arrangements of a subset of putative regulatory elements. These shared features were used to identify a neurogenic enhancer in the distantly related Anopheles genome. We suggest that the constrained organization of metazoan enhancers may be essential for their ability to produce precise patterns of gene expression during development. Organized binding sites should facilitate the identification of regulatory codes that link primary DNA sequence information with predicted patterns of gene activity.
动物多样性的进化取决于一组相对固定的蛋白质编码基因调控的变化。为了解这些变化是如何产生的，我们研究了四个协同调控的神经源性增强子中共享序列基序的组织情况，这些增强子在果蝇早期胚胎中指导相似的基因表达模式。所有四个增强子都具有一组推定调控元件的相似排列。这些共享特征被用于在远缘相关的按蚊基因组中鉴定一个神经源性增强子。我们认为后生动物增强子的受限组织对于它们在发育过程中产生精确基因表达模式的能力可能至关重要。有组织的结合位点应有助于识别将初级DNA序列信息与预测的基因活性模式联系起来的调控密码。
