Department of Biochemistry, University at Buffalo-State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA; NY State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Buffalo, NY, USA; Department of Biological Sciences, University at Buffalo-State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA; Department of Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo-State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA; Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Program in Cancer Genetics, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Trends Genet. 2019 Feb;35(2):93-103. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2018.11.004. Epub 2018 Dec 13.
Transcriptional enhancers play a major role in regulating metazoan gene expression. Recent developments in genomics and next-generation sequencing have accelerated and revitalized the study of this important class of sequence elements. Increased interest and attention, however, has also led to troubling trends in the enhancer literature. In this Opinion, I describe some of these issues and show how they arise from shifting and nonuniform enhancer definitions, and genome-era biases. I discuss how they can lead to interpretative errors and an unduly narrow focus on certain aspects of enhancer biology to the potential exclusion of others.
转录增强子在调节后生动物基因表达中起着重要作用。基因组学和下一代测序技术的最新发展加速并振兴了对这一重要序列元件类别的研究。然而，日益增长的兴趣和关注也导致了增强子文献中的一些令人不安的趋势。在本观点中，我描述了其中的一些问题，并展示了它们是如何由不断变化和不均匀的增强子定义以及基因组时代的偏见引起的。我讨论了它们如何导致解释性错误，并将注意力过分集中在增强子生物学的某些方面，而潜在地排除了其他方面。
