Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94707, USA.
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94707, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, CIRM Center of Excellence, Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94707, USA.
Cell. 2014 Mar 27;157(1):13-25. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.02.009.
Comparative genome analyses reveal that organismal complexity scales not with gene number but with gene regulation. Recent efforts indicate that the human genome likely contains hundreds of thousands of enhancers, with a typical gene embedded in a milieu of tens of enhancers. Proliferation of cis-regulatory DNAs is accompanied by increased complexity and functional diversification of transcriptional machineries recognizing distal enhancers and core promoters and by the high-order spatial organization of genetic elements. We review progress in unraveling one of the outstanding mysteries of modern biology: the dynamic communication of remote enhancers with target promoters in the specification of cellular identity.
比较基因组分析表明，生物复杂性的规模不是由基因数量决定，而是由基因调控决定的。最近的研究表明，人类基因组可能包含数十万个增强子，而一个典型的基因则嵌入在数十个增强子的环境中。顺式调控 DNA 的增殖伴随着识别远端增强子和核心启动子的转录机器的复杂性和功能多样化的增加，以及遗传元件的高阶空间组织的增加。我们回顾了在揭示现代生物学的一个突出谜团方面的进展：远程增强子与目标启动子之间的动态通信，以确定细胞身份。
