Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA.
Dev Biol. 2010 Mar 15;339(2):230-9. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2009.12.039. Epub 2010 Jan 4.
Genetic experiments over the last few decades have identified many developmental control genes critical for pattern formation and cell fate specification during the development of multicellular organisms. A large fraction of these genes encode transcription factors and signaling molecules, show highly dynamic expression patterns during development, and are deeply evolutionarily conserved and deregulated in various human diseases such as cancer. Because of their importance in development, evolution, and disease, a fundamental question in biology is how these developmental control genes are regulated in such an extensive and precise fashion. Using genomics methods, it has become clear that developmental control genes are a distinct group of genes with special regulatory characteristics. However, a systematic analysis of these characteristics has not been presented. Here we review how developmental control genes were discovered, evaluate their genome-wide regulation and gene structure, discuss emerging evidence for their mode of regulation, and estimate their overall abundance in the genome. Understanding the global regulation of developmental control genes may provide a new perspective on development in the era genomics.
在过去几十年的遗传实验中，已经确定了许多对多细胞生物发育过程中的模式形成和细胞命运特化至关重要的发育控制基因。这些基因的很大一部分编码转录因子和信号分子，在发育过程中表现出高度动态的表达模式，并且在各种人类疾病（如癌症）中是深度进化保守和失调的。由于它们在发育、进化和疾病中的重要性，生物学中的一个基本问题是这些发育控制基因是如何以如此广泛和精确的方式进行调控的。利用基因组学方法，已经清楚地表明，发育控制基因是具有特殊调控特征的一组独特的基因。然而，对这些特征的系统分析尚未提出。在这里，我们回顾了发育控制基因是如何被发现的，评估了它们在全基因组水平上的调控和基因结构，讨论了关于它们调控模式的新证据，并估计了它们在基因组中的总体丰度。了解发育控制基因的全局调控可能为基因组时代的发育提供一个新的视角。
