Department of Biology, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Mol Biol Evol. 2013 Feb;30(2):409-21. doi: 10.1093/molbev/mss240. Epub 2012 Oct 18.
Antisense transcription, or transcription on the opposite strand of the same genomic locus as another transcript, has been observed in many organisms, including yeast. Several antisense transcripts are known to be conserved across various species of yeast, and a few antisense transcripts are associated with functional regulation of the sense transcript. We detect antisense transcription from approximately 90% of protein-coding genes, and antisense transcription is generally associated with histone modifications indicative of a transcriptionally active state. The pattern of genome-wide antisense transcription in two species of budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus, is widely evolutionarily conserved: Antisense transcripts exhibit conserved expression levels and localization with respect to gene annotations. Regions of genes exhibiting conserved antisense transcription also show less sequence divergence than regions of genes without antisense transcription. These findings provide further support that widespread antisense transcription is functional in yeast, and expand the catalog of putative functional antisense transcripts to include nonpolyadenylated transcripts. Because antisense transcripts are less divergent in sequence than expected, they likely contain sequences important to their function.
反义转录，即在同一基因组基因座上与另一条转录本相反的链上进行的转录，在许多生物体中都有观察到，包括酵母。已经知道有几种反义转录本在各种酵母物种中是保守的，并且有一些反义转录本与功能调节相关。我们从大约 90%的编码蛋白质的基因中检测到反义转录，反义转录通常与指示转录活性状态的组蛋白修饰有关。在两种芽殖酵母，酿酒酵母和 S. paradoxus 中，全基因组反义转录的模式在广泛的进化上是保守的：反义转录本表现出与基因注释相对应的保守表达水平和定位。表现出保守反义转录的基因区域的序列差异也比没有反义转录的基因区域小。这些发现进一步支持了广泛的反义转录在酵母中是有功能的，并将假定的功能性反义转录本的目录扩展到包括非多聚腺苷酸化的转录本。由于反义转录本的序列差异比预期的要小，它们可能包含对其功能重要的序列。
