Archive by category | Bioinformatics

[Research highlight] Cis-regulatory evolution, not so mysterious after all?

Animal genomes are littered with conserved non-coding elements (CNEs)—most of which represent evolutionarily constrained cis-regulatory sequences—however, it is often not clear why these sequences are so exceptionally conserved, since anecdotal examples have shown that orthologous CNEs can have divergent functions in vivo (Strähle and Rastegar 2008; Elgar and Vavouri 2008). In an article recently published in Molecular Biology & Evolution, Ritter et al. compare the functional activities of 41 pairs of orthologous conserved non-coding elements (CNEs) from humans and zebrafish (2010). Interestingly, sequence similarity was found to be a poor predictor of which CNEs had conserved function. In contrast, the authors found that measuring transcription factor binding site change, instead of simple sequence divergence, improves their ability to predict functional conservation.  Read more