Thornburg Bartley G, Gotea Valer, Makałowski Wojciech
Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics and Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Gene. 2006 Jan 3;365:104-10. doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2005.09.036. Epub 2006 Jan 10.
Transposable elements (TEs) are major components of eukaryotic genomes, contributing about 50% to the size of mammalian genomes. TEs serve as recombination hot spots and may acquire specific cellular functions, such as controlling protein translation and gene transcription. The latter is the subject of the analysis presented. We scanned TE sequences located in promoter regions of all annotated genes in the human genome for their content in potential transcription regulating signals. All investigated signals are likely to be over-represented in at least one TE class, which shows that TEs have an important potential to contribute to pre-transcriptional gene regulation, especially by moving transcriptional signals within the genome and thus potentially leading to new gene expression patterns. We also found that some TE classes are more likely than others to carry transcription regulating signals, which can explain why they have different retention rates in regions neighboring genes.
转座元件（TEs）是真核生物基因组的主要组成部分，约占哺乳动物基因组大小的50%。TEs作为重组热点，可能获得特定的细胞功能，如控制蛋白质翻译和基因转录。后者是本文分析的主题。我们扫描了人类基因组中所有注释基因启动子区域的TE序列，以分析其中潜在的转录调控信号。所有研究的信号在至少一类TE中可能存在过度富集，这表明TEs在转录前基因调控中具有重要潜力，特别是通过在基因组内移动转录信号，从而可能导致新的基因表达模式。我们还发现，某些TE类别比其他类别更有可能携带转录调控信号，这可以解释它们在基因邻近区域具有不同保留率的原因。
